Bacteria extracted from an ancient ice cave is resistant to antibiotics

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Researchers say a strain of bacteria, encased in an underground ice cave for at least 5,000 years, has been found to be resistant to modern antibiotics despite never encountering them. Scientists say the discovery brings both risks and benefits.

“This was a very interesting finding, and it opens a lot of other questions and research directions in the future,” Carmen Chifiriuc, professor of microbiology at the University of Bucharest, told CTVNews.ca in an interview on Monday.

The findings, published on Tuesday in the scientific journal Frontiers in Microbiology, represented the first genome analysis of the particular bacterial strain Chifiriuc and a team of scientists found, “as well as the first characterization of ancient resistomes within this largely unexplored environment,” the researchers said.

Samples were taken from a layer of ice thousands of years old in the Scarisoara Ice Cave in Romania. It was there that the researchers found the Psychrobacter SC65A.3 bacterial strain, which showed resistance to multiple widely used modern antibiotics.

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