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Can landscape ecology untangle the complexity of antibiotic resistance?

Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 4, pages 943–952 (2006)Cite this article

A Corrigendum to this article was published on 01 January 2007

Abstract

Bacterial resistance to antibiotics continues to pose a serious threat to human and animal health. Given the considerable spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the distribution of resistance and the factors that affect its evolution, dissemination and persistence, we argue that antibiotic resistance must be viewed as an ecological problem. A fundamental difficulty in assessing the causal relationship between antibiotic use and resistance is the confounding influence of geography: the co-localization of resistant bacterial species with antibiotic use does not necessarily imply causation and could represent the presence of environmental conditions and factors that have independently contributed to the occurrence of resistance. Here, we show how landscape ecology, which links the biotic and abiotic factors of an ecosystem, might help to untangle the complexity of antibiotic resistance and improve the interpretation of ecological studies.

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Figure 1: A hypothetical agricultural ecosystem to explore the relationship between antibiotic use in animal agriculture and antibiotic resistance.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Tim Boyer, Janet Anderson and the reviewers for many helpful suggestions in improving the manuscript. We also thank Jeffrey Bender for supplying the Minnesota STEC dataset that was used in this manuscript. R.S.S. was partially supported by a United States Department of Agriculture National Research Initiative Competitive Grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 55455, Minnesota, USA

    Randall S. Singer & George Maldonado

  2. the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, 55108, Minnesota, USA

    Randall S. Singer & George Maldonado

  3. the Instituto de Medicina Preventiva Veterinaria, Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile

    Randall S. Singer & George Maldonado

  4. the Departamento de Microbiología, Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas, Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile

    Randall S. Singer & George Maldonado

  5. the Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, 77843–4458, Texas, USA

    Michael P. Ward

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Singer, R., Ward, M. & Maldonado, G. Can landscape ecology untangle the complexity of antibiotic resistance?. Nat Rev Microbiol 4, 943–952 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1553

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