SELECTAR - Selection for antimicrobial resistance by antimicrobial production waste

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Antibiotics are one of the most crucial medicines on the planet. Without them we are unable to treat the vast majority of infectious diseases, ranging from life threatening intestinal infections and blood stream infections, to treating debilitating chronic infections such as urinary tract infections and respiratory infections. Antibiotics are required to prevent the deaths of patients suffering from respiratory diseases such as CF and COPD, and are the corner stone of treatments for diseases such as cancer and leukaemia where it is necessary to prevent infections during treatment. The majority of the worlds antibiotics are produced in pharmaceutical factories in India. Antibiotics can be produced by chemical synthesis or by growing vast number of the microorganisms which naturally produce them. Either method results in the production of large quantities of waste, potentially containing active antibiotics and/or chemicals which may be toxic to bacteria and other cell types. This waste goes through treatment plants before being released into the environment. This creates an enormous potential issue, as the more we expose bacteria to antibiotics the faster they evolve resistance to the drugs meaning they cant be used to treat infections. There is also the possibility that release of waste into the environment kills all bacteria except those resistant, decimating important bacterial ecosystems and increasing resistant bacteria.We desperately need to know exactly how much the release of antibiotic production waste leads to the feared end results mentioned above . To do this we will sample environments into which antibiotic production waste is released, and compare them to pristine environments. This will allow us to determine exactly what effect the waste has on the microbial ecosystem, does it kill all beneficial bacteria to only leave harmful resistant bacteria alive. We will carefully examine the waste to determine exactly how much active antibiotic is released but also which other potentially toxic chemicals are contained within the waste that may affect bacteria. And we will then test the ability of these chemicals to also induce resistant bacteria, as a consequence of them trying to avoid chemical killing.