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• Overuse can certainly explain the selection for bacteria with genes for antibiotic resistance in environments that are heavily impacted by human activity (Gaze et al., 2013; Kraemer et al., 2019), but it cannot explain the widespread distribution of genes for resistance to clinically relevant antibiotics well away from hospitals and farms. Indeed, ...
• Focusing on resistance against aminoglycoside, a widely used family of antibiotics that includes streptomycin (Davies and Wright, 1997), the researchers conducted one of the largest surveys of antibiotic resistance genes to date. They analyzed more than 160,000 bacterial genomes collected from all over the globe, focusing on 27 clusters of genes th...
• antibiotics consumed in each country, commercial trade routes, and human migration. Finally, the samples came from eleven different biomes, representing a range of environments where antibiotic resistance can be found: clinical environments (like hospitals), human habitats, domestic animals, farms, agrosystems, wild plants and animals, freshwater, ...
• resistance increased between the 1940s and the 1980s, likely following an increase in the use of antibiotics after the discovery of streptomycin in 1943 (Schatz et al., 1944), and then remained at a prevalence of around 30%, despite an overall decrease in consumption. Crucially, they also discovered that around 40% of the resistance genes were pote...
• antibiotic-resistant bacteria are present in most biomes, and not just in hospitals and farms. Moreover, they found that the prevalence of aminoglycoside resistance genes varied more from biome to biome than it did with human geography or with the quantity of antibiotics used (Figure 1). This means that the antibiotic resistance found in humans in ...

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