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M.xanthus forms fruiting bodies when faced with starvation. Credit: Samay Pande et al.
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science studying microbial interactions in soil have stumbled on an ecological twist: the death of a bacteria hunter was helping drug-resistant bacteria flourish1.
At the centre of it was Myxococcus xanthus, a predatory slime bacterium known for its pack-hunting prowess. In soil across the world, M. xanthus swarms its microbial prey and kills en masse. But when researchers introduced it into soil samples and let it die off, they found that in the absence of antibiotics, bacteria resistant to drugs like tetracycline and rifampicin multiplied rapidly.
“We thought we’d contaminated the culture plates,” said Samay Pande, an evolutionary biologist who led the study. “But we kept seeing the same result.”
Repeated experiments confirmed it: the breakdown of M. xanthus cells — a process called lysis — during fruiting body formation, released a cocktail of biomolecules, including proteins and phosphodiester compounds.
The findings challenge the dominant narrative that antimicrobial resistance in the environment is mainly driven by pollution from sewage, pharmaceutical waste, or agriculture. Instead, the team shows that natural ecological dynamics, like bacterial predation and death, can promote resistance without human interference.
“This adds a new dimension to how we think about antimicrobial resistance in the wild,” said Gaurav Sharma, a computational microbiologist at IIT Hyderabad who studies myxobacteria.
In controlled soil microcosms, researchers tracked microbial shifts over time using both culturing and metagenomics. After M. xanthus was introduced and allowed to die, frequency of bacterial cells resistant to antibiotics shot up in different species of soil bacteria.
Chemical analysis confirmed the presence of growth-inhibiting substances in the lysed bacterial mix — the same substances that M. xanthus once used to kill its prey. The phenomenon seems to offer resistant strains a survival edge. “It’s almost like the predator clears the competition before dying, so its spores, — and other resistant organisms, — face less of a fight,” said Pande.
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