科学美国人60秒 SSS Bacteria Can Be Resistant to Brand-New Antibiotics（在线收听）

Bacteria Can Be Resistant to Brand-New Antibiotics

谁在对抗最新的抗生素

Perhaps the chief poster child of antibiotic resistance is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. The bacterium is impervious to a suite of antibiotics, and can cause blood infections, pneumonia…even death. And you'd assume that it developed its namesake resistance to methicillin…by being exposed to methicillin.

也许抗生素耐药性的主要代表就是“耐甲氧西林金黄色葡萄球菌(MRSA)”。这种细菌不受一系列抗生素的影响，并能引发血液感染、肺炎……甚至死亡。你可能会认为它是通过被暴露于甲氧西林，才生出了同名的抗甲氧西林耐药性……

\But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, the culprit for resistance appears to be an earlier, and chemically related antibiotic: penicillin. "We think it's a very early use of penicillin that forced the strains to pick up these mechanisms." Matthew Holden, a molecular microbiologist at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland.

但事实并非如此。相反，耐药性的罪魁祸首似乎是更早的、与化学相关的抗生素：青霉素（盘尼西林）。“我们认为是一种较早时期使用的青霉素迫使菌株去提取了这些机制。”苏格兰圣安德鲁斯大学的一名分子微生物学家马修·霍顿说道。

Holden and his team analyzed the genomes of freeze-dried strains of MRSA bacteria, from the 1960s through the '80s. "In effect what we were doing was sort of genomic archaeology, in looking at the genomes, and comparing the variation and using that information to effectively reconstruct the evolutionary histories."

霍顿和他的团队分析了20世纪60年代到80年代的、经过冷冻干燥处理的MRSA细菌菌株的基因组。“实际上，我们做的有点像基因组考古。通过研究基因组，比较变异并利用这些信息有效地重建进化史。”

What they found was that the Staph bacteria seem to have acquired the methicillin-resistance gene in the mid-1940s—about 15 years before methicillin even hit the market. And they determined that it was the widespread use of penicillin that led to that adaptation. The results are in the journal Genome Biology.

他们发现，葡萄球菌似乎是在20世纪40年代中期获得了“抗甲氧西林耐药性”的基因——大约在甲氧西林进入市场的15年前。他们断定是青霉素的广泛使用导致了这种适应性。该研究结果发表在《基因生物学》杂志上。

Methicillin was introduced in the U.K. in 1959. Less than a year later, resistance was first reported—resistance that it appears now was already baked into the staph strains. Looking ahead, Holden says we'd do well to vigilantly monitor the genetics of circulating strains—to find out which bugs may be armed to battle our newest antibiotics as soon as they’re developed.

英国于1959年引入了甲氧西林。不到一年，就第一次报道出了抗药性——一种似乎现在已经进入了葡萄球菌菌株的耐药性。霍顿表