5,000-Year-Old Cave Bacteria Resists Modern Antibiotics

1:10and how they may be related, some of the shared genetic roots between us and dogs, and we will wrap up with an AI story about how the battle for control at Meta AI has now led to the start of a new billion-dollar AI company coming at a different angle than large language models as we know it. We will be learning about the science not quite from the ground up, but at least from the top of the surface because this is from first principles.

1:55Our first story for the rundown today is out of the Institute of biology in Bucharest of the Romanian Academy and it was in the frontiers in microbiology. Frozen for 5,000 years, this ice cave bacterium resists modern antibiotics, which sounds a little bit scary. >> Yeah, dude. This one was pretty pretty weird. Um there is a cave in Romania. It is called the Scărișoara Cave. >> Okay. >> It's got this giant glacier that's about the size of 40 Olympic swimming pools. And that glacier began to form about 13,000 years ago. And what you can do is you can drill cores into that ice and then extract

2:38those samples. And there's bacteria that are preserved in that ice. And bacteria are notorious for surviving being frozen for thousands of years. So, we can bring back to life bacteria that have been frozen for thousands of years. This particular sample is from the 5,000-year-old layer of that glacier. They took it out, they revived it, and they tested it on modern antibiotics. They tested 28 and this bacteria was resistant to 10. >> Not great. >> Yeah, it's really quite strange on the face of it. >> Okay. >> Because modern antibiotics are by

3:19definition modern, right? So, we've developed these you know, antibacterial medication such that it kills bacteria. And these bacteria that are 5,000 years old still have a kind of defense to stuff that we made today. This is in line with a lot of the anti-bac- antibacterial like um resistance that we're faced with as humanity, right? We've been using antibiotics for hundreds of years now. The first real big one was penicillin by Alexander Fleming before World War and because we've been going at it bacteria has evolved to fight against >> Right. >> these antibiotics, right? They've

4:00figured out ways to get around it. And the fact that 10 of these 28 did not work on bacteria that were 5,000 years old suggests that these bacteria were already resistant in the first place, right? Okay, fine. 18 worked, but still the 10 is kind of weird. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It It's It kind of dovetails with the the story we just talked about as it relates to bringing back samples from space. >> Yeah. >> Uh and the the concern that arises because we don't know what will happen >> Yeah. >> if there happens to be Again, that's a little bit This is real world. We know that it's there. >> Yeah. >> Uh we've tested it. And they're basically pre- They have pre-immunity.

4:42Like They were never our current antibiotic it infrastructure >> to the current antibiotics and yet they're still already immune. >> Right. >> Right? It's quite weird. Um I don't think we should be too worried about these glacial glacial bacteria because these are called psychrobacters. >> Okay. >> Psychrobacteria, which means they're cold-loving. They're not going to survive in the 98 97 98° F environment >> of the body. >> of the body, right? But it's still quite a nice um you know, little problem in molecular biology that like how could this even happen? >> Right. >> And when when you look at like how bacteria

5:23actually evolve, they evolve together. Bacteria are incredibly dynamic with their genomes. They swap genes from one to another all the time. That's actually how we transform bacteria. A lot of times, you know, in an undergrad lab, if you want to like make a bacteria glow in the dark or something with a GFP, which is this fluorescent molecule, what you can do is put in a plasmid, which is a circular piece of DNA that has the GFP code. >> Mhm. >> You put that in and then you heat shock the bacteria. There's something that we've talked about a lot, where you just take the bacteria and you put it in hot water. And then the bacteria kind of freak out and they're like, "What are we doing?" They ingest all sorts of DNA in their from their environment and they

6:03try to transcribe that and see if that'll work. So, bacteria are swapping DNA between themselves and the environment all the time and perhaps through the swapping you get this kind of drug resistance. >> Mhm. >> this this story is that it actually the existence of this reveals how antibiotic resistance evolves naturally. >> Mhm. >> So, that's one thing. The other thing is that this ancient strain also showed the inha bi the So, this ancient strain showed the ability to inhibit the growth of other modern superbugs. >> Oh, wow. >> of like in penicillin, when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, it was because it was a natural antibiotic >> Mhm. >> that he had seen there was a mold that

6:44was growing in his Petri dish and around that mold there was no bacteria. And he was like, "The mold is creating something that is killing the bacteria." >> Yes. >> Well, in this case, this ancient strain is able to create compounds that will kill modern superbugs. >> Mhm. >> Right? >> Mhm. >> So, it possesses some kind of enzymatic gene that can hold existing biochemical potential, right? Existing pharmaceutical potential. >> Right. >> And so, it tells us that maybe like we need to look at these kinds of natural places at isolated populations of bacteria to figure out how to beat modern-day superbugs that are now resistant to our back antibacterial

7:26>> Right. >> compounds, antibiotic compounds, but maybe these guys have something >> Right. >> that we can use to defeat them. You know, it's like that Thor um "I can't defeat you, but she can" >> Yeah, yeah. >> thing. Like, but the she can't thing is like these like 5,000 year old bacteria. >> Right. With some a there is a we can look to the past uh to help inform us about how to fight in the present and in the future in a way that was maybe somewhat unexpected in that these bacteria that are 5,000 years old contain sort of an active ingredient >> Yeah. >> that is relevant to sort of a pharmacological pharmaceutical

8:07application today. >> And and historically most antibiotics are developed from bacteria and fungi that live in the soil. >> I see. >> And like they produce natural compounds because over there down there it's like it's like D-Day every day, right? It's just World War all the time. Everyone is trying to eat everyone. And in recent times those pathogens that we found from existing soil bacteria no longer work. Well, we can, you know, go back in time. >> Yeah. >> I think it's it's a pretty cool story at at the heart of it. >> And for it gives a new meaning to the phrase natural immunity. >> Yeah. >> And if we can scale up the same process that