Ant-ibiotics vs Antibiotic Resistance!

Antibiotics are, in medical terms, very much a necessary evil.

• They are necessary: their invention and subsequent use has saved countless lives
• They are an “evil”:
  • directly, they wipe out most of our microbiome, most of which we need to live, and certainly to live healthily. We wrote about this here: Antibiotics? Think Thrice ← including 4 ways antibiotics can kill you
  • indirectly, they “train” a lot of pathogens to simply get more pathogenic, and in essence “what doesn’t kill them makes them stronger”, insofar as when something wipes out 99.9% of a microbe population, the other 0.1% often survived because it had a mutation that gave it the ability to resist the antibiotic. That mutation then gets copied forwards (because there are no other living microbes nearby whose genes to copy, so it’s the microbe with the mutation that get copied to start repopulating), and before you know it, we have a whole new “antibiotic-resistant” strain of the latest superbug.

Of course, the greatest part of this latter harm comes not from humans taking antibiotics directly, but from antibiotics being used in farm animals (including farmed fish) and entering the food chain that way. See for example: Farmed Fish vs Wild Caught: Important Differences

Still, taking antibiotics directly is also not something one should do unless it is very clearly indicated, and a competent doctor is telling you to do so.

Even then, there are some precautions that it’s good to take: Minimize The Harm Of Antibiotics

Ant-ibiotics to the rescue?

Researchers (Dr. Mary Chon et al.) noted that humans have used antibiotics for less than a century, while ants have developed and used antimicrobial compounds for tens of millions of years without widespread resistance.

So, how do they do it, and could we benefit from that?

What Dr. Chon and her team discovered is that ants produce multiple classes of antimicrobial compounds rather than relying on a single chemical defense, reducing the chance that pathogens evolve resistance. These compounds are produced naturally by the exocrine system—that’s like our endocrine system, but it’s exo-. In other words, for us it’s on the inside only, and for ants it’s on the outside. Much like our skeleton is on the inside, while ants have an exoskeleton.

❝If we just dump antibiotics into systems to kill everything, we’re not only killing our target pathogen but also killing all these other microbes that aren’t harming us. Just like us, ants seem to have different medicines in their medicine cabinet that they can try if the first one doesn’t work. And it looks like ants have been doing this for millions of years.❞

~ Dr. Clint Penick, a researcher on the team

In particular, the ants produce targeted compounds that act on specific groups of microbes, including fungi, gram-negative bacteria, and gram-positive bacteria, instead of broadly killing all microbes:

❝Inhibition also varied across microbial groups, with some species showing stronger effects against particular classes of microbes.

Notably, five of the six ant species tested inhibited Candida auris, an emerging fungal pathogen of critical concern in human medicine due to its multidrug resistance❞

~ Dr. Mary Chon et al.

The goal now, therefore, is identifying the specific compounds ants produce and understanding how they deploy them, with the aim of discovering new drugs for resistant infections.

You can find the paper itself, here: Dual strategies in ant antimicrobial defences: evidence for chemical diversity and microbial specificity

Want to learn more?

Check out:

Morin: Your Mouth’s New Best Friend

…for another nature-derived alternative to antibiotics.

Take care!