Deadly infections increasingly able to win against antibiotics

These organisms are very small, but they are still smarter than we are.

Since commercial production of penicillin began in the 1940s, antibiotics have been the miracle drugs of modern medicine, suppressing infectious diseases that have afflicted human beings for thousands of years. But today, as a generation of Baby Boomers begins to enter a phase of life marked by the ailments of aging, we are running out of miracles against bacteria.

"Within just a few years, we could be seeing that most of our microorganisms are resistant to most of our antibiotics," said Dr. Jack Edwards, chief of infectious diseases at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Terry Hazen, senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and director of its ecology program, is not at all surprised by the tenacity of our bacterial foes. "We are talking about 3.5 billion years of evolution," he said. "They are the dominant life on Earth."

Bacteria have invaded virtually every ecological niche on the planet. Human explorers of extreme environments such as deep wells and mines are still finding new bacterial species. "As you go deeper into the subsurface, thousands and thousands of feet, you find bacteria that have been isolated for millions of years - and you find multiple antibiotic resistance," Hazen said.

In his view, when bacteria develop resistance to modern antibiotics, they are merely rolling out old tricks they mastered eons ago in their struggle to live in harsh environments in competition with similarly resilient species.

Via SFGate.com

New Study Shows Beetles Amazing Success Story

A new evolutionary study has shown. that beetles are much stronger than we thought and first appeared on Earth at the same time as the earliest dinosaurs and survived until our time

Today, there are an estimated 350,000 known species of beetle on Earth, and probably several million more yet to be discovered, say scientists. The insects account for about a quarter of all life forms on the planet.

The new research shows that modern beetle lineages go back further than anyone suspected, even pre-dating the emergence of flowering plants. Previously it had been assumed that the beetles' success story was partly due to flowers which started to bloom in the Cretaceous period, from around 140 million years ago.

Flowering plants were thought to have provided beetles with new sources of food and habitats.

But according to the latest findings many of today's beetle families originated during the earlier Jurassic period, which also saw the appearance of the first major groups of dinosaurs.

Beetles first entered the fossil record in the Lower Permian period, nearly 300 million years ago.

Study leader Professor Alfried Vogler, from Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum, said: "The large number of beetle species existing today could very well be a direct result of this early evolution and the fact that there has been a very high rate of survival and continuous diversification of many lineages since then."

Prof Vogler's team used DNA sequencing and fossil records to compile a comprehensive evolutionary "family tree" for beetles.

By comparing the DNA of 1,880 different beetle species, the scientists were able to identify those which descended from a common ancestor. Fossils of known ages were used to date key moments of evolution and diversification on the ancestral tree.

While the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, beetles have continued to flourish, evolving into a plethora of different shapes and sizes.