Gene-swapping viruses are likely behind antibiotic resistance

It’s like a microscopic Fight Club.

There’s a bromance of nightmares lurking where you least suspect it — on handrails, doorknobs, even your own skin. These innocuous places are meeting grounds for viruses and bacteria, a microscopic Fight Club of sorts where the former train the latter to get better, stronger, and more resistant to our means of eradication.

That’s according to a study published May 9 in the journal Nature Communications where researchers at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) uncover the first evidence of how viruses in man-made environments influence co-mingling bacteria. They found viruses, including those that are bacteriophages that specifically infect bacteria, help their microscopic neighbors by passing on genes that help a bacterium survive in nutrient-poor environments and may even confer antibiotic resistance.

"As more and more of the global population are living in urban areas, the importance of hygiene in man-made environments is growing, particularly indoor ones, as occupants inside are constantly exposed to diverse microorganisms, which have public health implications,” Patrick Kwan Ho Lee, the study’s lead researcher and professor of CityU’s School of Energy and Environment, said in a press release. “However, most previous studies of man-made environments overlooked viruses.”

Lee and his colleagues went around Hong Kong swabbing different surfaces such as handrails, floors, ticket kiosks, and doorknobs found in piers, public facilities, residences, and subways, collecting a total of 738 samples. The residence samples also included over 130 collected from swabbing human skin, specifically palms and forearms. FULL STORY from Inverse