Antibiotic resistance is now a leading public health concern worldwide. Some microbes, often referred to as "superbugs," are resistant to virtually all antibiotics. This is of special concern in hospitals, where about 5 percent of hospitalized patients will fight infections that arise during their stay. As researchers around the world are urgently seeking solutions for this problem, insight into the origin and evolution of antibiotic resistance will help inform their search.

    “By analyzing the genomes and behaviors of today's enterococci, we were able to rewind the clock back to their earliest existence and piece together a picture of how these organisms were shaped into what they are today” said co-corresponding author Ashlee M. Earl, Ph.D., group leader for the Bacterial Genomics Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “Understanding how the environment in which microbes live leads to new properties could help us to predict how microbes will adapt to the use of antibiotics, antimicrobial hand soaps, disinfectants and other products intended to control their spread.”

    The picture the researchers pieced together begins with the dawn of life. Bacteria arose nearly 4 billion years ago, and the planet has teemed with them ever since, including the sea. Animals first arose in the sea during the time known as the Cambrian Explosion, 542 million years ago. As animals emerged in a sea of bacteria, bacteria learned to live in and on them. Some bacteria protect and serve the animals, as the healthy microbes in our intestines do today; others live in the environment, and still others cause disease. As animals crawled onto land about 100 million years later, they took their microbes with them.

Source: www.phys.org

Growing unknown microbes one by one

     Trillions of bacteria live in the human body, and although there's plenty of evidence that these microbes play a collective role in human health, we know very little about the individual bacterial species. Employing the use of a specially designed glass chip with tiny compartments, researchers provide a way to target and grow specific microbes from the gut a key step in understanding which bacteria are helpful to human health and which are harmful.

      Although a few bacterial species are easy to grow in the laboratory, needing only a warm environment and plenty of food to multiply, most species that grow in and on the human body have never been successfully grown in lab conditions. It's difficult to recreate the complexity of the microbiome -- the entire human microbial community -- in one small plate (a lidded dish with nutrients used to grow microbes), says Rustem Ismagilov, Ethel Wilson Bowles and Robert Bowles Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech.