Horizontal gene transfer is the transfer of genes between bacteria. Most organisms only pass on genes vertically – that is from parent to offspring. But bacteria can exchange genes among themselves, including genes that enable them to resist antibiotics.
Another worrisome feature of current antibiotics is the fact they are indiscriminate. If you consume an antibiotic for an infection in your foot, it does not magically go to your foot alone, but is distributed throughout the body, affecting some of the “good” bacteria that live on and in us.
For this reason, many of the 100 trillion bacteria that live in each of us have become resistant to commonly used antibiotics. These “good” bacteria can then transfer resistance to their disease-causing companions.
WE NEED TO CHANGE HOW ANTIMICROBIALS WORK
In order to control antibiotic resistance, we need to think about antimicrobial therapy in new ways. One of these ways is to tackle disease-causing bacteria selectively, without killing them.
This can work because most bacteria don’t need to cause disease in order to survive, and if our treatments aren’t designed to kill them, the selection for resistant mutants will be weak, and they can go on living, while causing us no harm.
This may sound fanciful, but it is already proving effective. For example, there are drugs for urinary tract infections, that do not kill the bacteria, but instead target the molecules the bacteria need to stick to the bladder wall.
This means the bacteria can’t colonise our bladders and make us sick. But as we are not trying to kill them, they have no need to learn to evade our treatments.
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