Drug-Resistant Bacteria Found In The Guts Of Lemurs Who Live Around Humans
DURHAM, N.C. – Antibiotic resistance, which the CDC calls one of the world’s most urgent public health crises, is now being found in the guts of lemurs, our distant primate cousins.
In a new study appearing Aug. 9 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Duke researchers have found evidence for antibiotic resistance in the microbiome of lemurs living close to humans. And the closer the contact, the more antibiotic resistance they found.
The research team, graduate student Sally Bornbusch and Christine Drea, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, sampled the dung of ring-tailed lemurs and sequenced the genes of all microbes found there, looking for genetic markers of antibiotic resistance.
The study compared 10 lemur populations: seven wild populations in Madagascar, two from research facilities --the Lemur Rescue Center in Madagascar and the Duke Lemur Center in the United States --and finally a group of lemurs kept as pets in Madagascar.
In wild animals, the average proportion of resistance genes in the gut microbiomes was close to zero. But in animals from research facilities, that proportion was more than 25 times greater than in wild lemurs. In pet lemurs, the proportion was almost 35 times greater.
