One of the most common arguments for rainforest conservation is the potential for unclassified biodiversity to hold some medical secret. But maybe the real pharmaceutical treasure trove is somewhere less exotic; perhaps it’s right under our noses, or rather, right under our feet.
A very exciting news piece came out a few weeks ago documenting a new bacteria culturing method that can produce new antibiotics from a location that most people might find mundane: the soil. If you think about it, the soil habitat is the perfect location for the evolution of chemical defenses against bacteria. Fungi, nematodes, plants and a mind-boggling number of other organisms are all competing with bacteria for finite resources or are preyed upon by bacteria, and these bacteria are some of the hardiest on the planet.
Soil bacteria have to hold up against a multitude of changing environmental conditions like oxygen availability, nutrient concentrations, soil moisture and temperature, pressure and the presence of other inorganic and biologically-derived chemicals. It would be like you, a human, trying to survive in a habitat where one second you were breathing and eating normally and the next second all of the oxygen disappeared, highly concentrated sulfuric acid started falling from the sky, your neighbor started releasing cyanide into your yard and the delicious bowl of soup you were eating was replaced with a vat of battery acid.
Basically, soil organisms are the very definition of hardcore, and medical researchers have been taking advantage of this for years. In fact, according to Marcel Jaspars, the director of an EU-led hunt for new antibiotics, 70 percent of all antibiotics used today come from soil and marine sediment dwelling organisms. But the problem with soil organisms is that 99 percent of soil microbes cannot be cultured in laboratory settings, making them useless as candidates for pharmaceutical drugs. Well, until early January.
The solution seems rather intuitive, but the results of Kim Lewis’s study are truly revolutionary. Instead of trying to coax bacteria to multiply on petri dishes, they developed an incubation chamber which squishes bacteria-rich soil between two membranes, and then the whole chamber is put back into the soil. After a period of growth, the diffusion chamber can be removed, and any bacteria that resides in the chamber can then be grown in the lab. With this remarkable example of innovative thinking, scientists just unlocked a huge amount of soil microorganisms that we can study to discover new antiobiotics.
Perhaps medical breakthroughs these days won’t come from discovering the bizarre and unique, but from figuring out how to climb over the walls that have previously kept scientists out of the study systems that exist right outside their laboratory buildings.
Kenna Rewcastle is a senior in College Scholars. She can be reached at [email protected].
