Experts Work on 'Evolutionary Forecasting' Tool

As we pointed out earlier, the state of the “war” between microorganisms and humans is getting increasingly worrying for our species. In spite of being more complex in make-up than bacteria – or maybe because of that –, we cannot adapt very fast to their mutations, and our immune systems just cannot keep up. An important tool to ensure our survival is currently in the works at the Rice University. Experts are designing an “evolutionary forecasting” tool, which will be able to hint at how microorganisms become resistant to antibiotics, and how they will evolve in the future.

“Our goal is to show antibiotic makers which sets of genes a pathogen will modify to become drug-resistant. If they know the molecular path that an organism will take to become resistant to a new drug, our hope is that they can find ways to cut off that path,” RU expert Yousif Shamoo, who is also the principal investigator of the research, explains the goal of the project.

The study is funded under a $1-million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Healthcare experts believe that there is currently a great need for such studies, as antibiotics-resistance is starting to become a very large problem in hospitals around the world.

Because people have the tendency to over-medicate themselves when they fall ill, their bodies, immune systems, and the pathogens themselves become immune to the effects of the drugs. As a result, bacteria and viral strains develop that cannot be killed by even the most powerful antibiotics. One good example for this is the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a very dangerous bacterium that lives predominantly in hospital environments and attacks people with weak immune systems.

“We'll start with a batch of bacteria in a controlled vessel, and on day one we'll add a small amount of the drug. Each day, we'll ramp up how much drug we add, and we'll do that continuously for weeks. The organism is forced to evolve or die. In previous studies using both drugs and using environmental changes like increased heat, we have found that organisms do evolve, and they do it in a repeatable, predictable way,” Shamoo adds about how the new investigation will be conducted.

“We're interested in building those physical relationships that show how molecules confer drug resistance. The idea is that if you understand the mutation and what the mutation does to an enzyme or protein, then you can understand how that helps increase the fitness of a population of bacteria. We hope there are common ideas and common themes among organisms,” the expert concludes.