Effective antibiotics that reliably kill pathogenic bacteria are foundational to modern medicine. Over decades of antibiotic use, certain bacteria have acquired resistance to the therapeutics designed to kill them. Today, antibiotic resistance represents one of our generation’s most pressing global public health challenges, with some experts warning of an approaching “postantibiotic” era. Mitigating this threat will require an understanding of the evolutionary ecology of resistance including connectivity between human, animal, and environmental spheres. We propose to use the Galápagos Islands as a model system to study how antibiotic resistance genes enter, persist, and move across these compartments. The Galápagos Islands are a largely protected ecosystem with points of acute anthropogenic impact. We will use next-generation sequencing methods to probe bacterial communities for antibiotic resistance genes in the environment, wildlife, and humans. Ultimately, this One Health approach will enhance our understanding of how anthropogenic impacts shape the environmental resistome.
Bornbusch S and Grube A. (2019). Antibiotic resistance in wildlife population and wild ecosystems. Plan A.