Until the 20th century, mankind has learned to use the first antibiotic, penicillin. However, the ants have come up the idea of using a natural antibiotic as a pesticide long before. A new study in Britain showed that ants also understood the “combination therapy” to use a variety of antibiotics to protect themselves.
The kind of ants studied by the British scientists was living in Central America, South America and southern America. These ants usually cut a small piece of leaf with the teeth as a raw material, and take the plant fungus as food. As the kind of their “crop†is single, the ants’ fungus “fields” are vulnerable to be attacked by disease and natural enemy, such as fungal infection.
The previous studies had found that this kind of leaf-cutting ant would use the fungal antibiotics produced by the bacteria in its body to suppress the bacteria in the “fields”, just like humans clearing the pests and weeds in the farmlands with pesticides. However, it’s the first time that this study found that the ants would also use the combination of antibiotics. The ants rarely encounter the problem of bacteria resistance. That they are able to use the combination therapy may be a major reason.
Several days ago, the British University of East Anglia has issued the communiqué that the school researchers collected three groups of leaf-cutting ants from the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago. The researchers isolated bacteria which produce the antibiotics from their bodies and found that these ants would use a variety of antibiotics in combination. It’s much like the combination of human treatment methods.
Only a few decades after human use the antibiotics, a serious problem of drug resistance would occur. The kind of “super bacteria” which has resistance to commonly used antibiotics appears more than once. In recent years, people began use the combination therapy to prevent the bacteria resistant. The study above has showed that the ants had mastered this approach for a long time. The report on the research has been published in the latest issue of the British magazine BMC Biology.
Jodhpur Dental College,JNU
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