scinerds:

Antibiotic Overuse May Increase Superbug Evolution Rate

By flooding our environment with antibiotics, people may alter a little-appreciated but profound aspect of bacterial evolution: the very pace at which it occurs. Bacteria may evolve more rapidly and more radically than just a few decades ago.

This proposition is still a hypothesis, but it’s an intriguing one. While drug resistance is a well-known consequence of antibiotic use, a global acceleration of bacterial mutability could make drug resistance more common and shape pathogens in unpredictable ways.

“Human activities might be altering the fundamental tempo of bacterial evolution,” write geneticists Michael Gillings of Australia’s Macquarie University and Hatch Stokes of the University of Technology in a June Trends in Ecology and Evolution paper.

(via ikenbot)