The answer does not lie in the soil

摘要

Antibiotic-resistance genes move readily between unrelated bacteria in hospital settings, prompting speculation that resistance genes in soil contribute to an increasing flow of antibiotic resistance from environmental to pathogenic organisms. This study refutes that idea. Kevin Forsberg et al. performed functional metagenomic selections for resistance to 18 antibiotics from a series of agricultural and grassland soils, and find that soil bacteria rarely have the sequence signatures of resistance gene exchange between species. It seems that particular organisms, rather than horizontally exchanged DNA elements, are the major disseminators of antibiotic resistance in the soil.