Exposure to existing antibiotics can imbue infectious bacteria with resistance that also kicks in against new drugs related to the originals. Christopher Intagliata reports.
长期暴露在现存抗生素下会导致传染性细菌对抗生素产生抗性，这种抗性对与原药物相关的新药也有效果。克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔报道。
撰文/播音：克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔（Christopher Intagliata）
翻译：郭鑫鹏
审校：郭晓
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.
抗生素耐药性的典型代表可能就是耐甲氧西林金黄色葡萄球菌(MRSA)。这种细菌对于许多抗生素都有着很强的耐药性，并且它可以导致血液感染、肺炎…甚至死亡。你可能认为它是因为暴露在甲氧西林下而有了与之同名的耐药性。
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.
但事实似乎并非如此。促使它产生耐药性的似乎是一个更早被发现、并与甲氧西林有着化学关联的抗生素：盘尼西林。“我们认为促使这个菌种产生耐药性的是人们早期对盘尼西林使用。“苏格兰圣安德鲁大学分子微生物学家马修·霍尔登（Matthew Holden）说。
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."
霍尔登和他的团队分析了1960年至1980年间MRSA冻干菌种的基因组。“事实上我们做的工作类似于基因组考古，通过分析基因组，比较菌种间的突变，我们便能利用这些信息来有效地重现进化的历史。“
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. [Catriona P. Harkins et al., Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus emerged long before the introduction of methicillin into clinical practice]
他们发现葡萄球菌似乎在1940年代中期就产生了耐甲氧西林的基因——这比甲氧西林进入市场还早了15年。他们断定是因为盘尼西林的广泛使用而导致了这样的适应性。该研究结果发表在期刊《基因组生物学》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.
甲氧西林在1959年进入英国市场。不到一年，便有报道发现了耐药性细菌——这个耐药性其实早已存在于葡萄球菌中。谈到未来，霍尔登说我们将对流行菌种的遗传学特征进行谨慎地监测——这是为了在它们对我们最新的抗生素产生耐药性的时候就将其扼杀在摇篮里。
—Christopher Intagliata
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