Scientists are turning to the world’s most extreme environments to find new ways of combating drug resistance.
where the Gobi Desert meets the Tibetan Plateau, lies a vast expanse of rippling sand dunes, mountains, and bare rock. Winters here are long and harsh, with temperatures sinking below –25 degrees Celsius, and rainfall is so sporadic that only well-adapted species are able to survive. For decades, researchers have ventured here to search for life that can exist in this hostile environment.
Recently they’ve been hunting for something in particular. Scientists believe that organisms that live in tough environments could help combat the urgent and ever-growing threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which are becoming increasingly deadly. Theof their impact, released earlier this year, estimates that drug-resistant bacteria directly killed over a million people in 2019 and played a part in the deaths of several million more people that year.
One way of countering this threat is to find new antibiotics—substances that bacteria haven’t had a chance to become resistant to—and bacteria themselves are a good source for these. Many drugs we use today are substances that bacteria produce to protect themselves from other microbes. Lots of research therefore focuses on finding new bacteria with antimicrobial properties—hence trekking into the desert.
“The idea is that the more extreme the conditions, the more the organisms that exist are going to be forced to evolve and adapt,” says Paul Dyson, a molecular microbiologist at Swansea University Medical School in the UK. Where tough conditions mean high competition for survival, you’ll find bacteria that produce stronger defenses against their rivals, the theory goes.
And in the depths of the desert, Dyson and his collaborators at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered a species of bacteria that does indeed have an edge—and could transform the process of antibiotic discovery itself.bacteria they had discovered in the far south of the Gobi Desert, in a region called the Alxa Plateau.
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