A University of Kansas geologist’s work in the remote High Arctic of Norway has exposed the startling global spread of antibiotic-resistant microbes — including multidrug-resistant “superbugs” — that could have dire implications for human health worldwide. Jennifer Roberts, professor and chair of geology at KU, began by investigating the microbial geochemistry of thawing permafrost and its release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that speeds global climate change.
But follow-up analysis of the soil samples Roberts collected in the Kongsfjorden region of Svalbard, Norway, also showed that antibiotic-resistant genes have transferred into soil-microbe populations in one of Earth’s most remote locations. The findings by Roberts and an international team of colleagues from the United Kingdom and China were just published in the peer-reviewed journal Environment International.
“The study offered a good opportunity to test soil samples for antibiotic genes with the hypothesis that Svalbard was such a remote and isolated place, we wouldn’t find any evidence of such genes,” Roberts said. “In contrast, we found quite a few including superbug antibiotic-resistant genes like the New Delhi gene, which first emerged in India not very long ago. This was a surprise — the genes we found clearly had a short transfer time between being discovered in India and our group detecting them in the Arctic only a few years later.”
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