By evolving in an environment of antibiotic production, incredibly resilient bacteria must develop diverse ways to survive or resist the toxic antimicrobial compounds produced by their neighbors.

Their coping tactics may be able to give us a glimpse into the future of clinical resistance to antibiotics.

It explains where these things come from in the first place. This work could prove to be extremely valuable to the drug development process.

We were curious to see where these things might come from in the first place, so it seemed that was a logical place to start. I expect lots of these (drug-resistant) genes are peppered all over the microbial community.