A team of researchers has discovered that latent antimicrobial resistance is more widespread across the world than known resistance.
In a study published in Nature Communications, a group of researchers analyzed 1,240 wastewater samples from 351 cities in 111 different countries. They found that bacterial latent antimicrobial resistance is widespread on all the world’s continents. They then compared the geographical distribution of antimicrobial resistance genes and found a far wider geographical distribution of latent resistance genes than acquired ones.
While the antimicrobial resistance genes investigated do not currently pose a major risk, some of them probably will in the future, according to the researchers. That’s why they are using their paper to call for broader surveillance of resistance in wastewater. Expanded surveillance would offer hope that researchers can determine where and how antimicrobial resistance arises and spreads and can map the ecology of the genes.
“By tracking both acquired and latent antimicrobial resistance genes, we can gain a broad overview of how they develop, change hosts and spread in our environment and thereby better target efforts against antimicrobial resistance,” said co-corresponding author Hannah-Marie Martiny. “Wastewater is a practical and ethical way to monitor AMR because it aggregates waste from humans, animals and the immediate surroundings.”
The difference between latent resistance genes and acquired resistance genes is that acquired genes are known to be able to jump to new bacterial hosts, whereas latent resistance genes can jump to new bacterial hosts in the laboratory, but researchers do not yet know whether they will at some point be able to do so in the environment.
“When new antibiotics are developed, bacteria may already have invented new ‘scissors’ capable of destroying them. If we can study both types of genes over time, we may be able to find out which of the latent genes become problematic resistance genes, how they arise and how they spread across geography and bacteria, and in that way lessen the burden of antimicrobial resistance,” said co-corresponding author Patrick Munk.
Data from DTU National Food Institute