Al Ain: A research group from the Department of Biology at the United Arab Emirates University Al Ain, in collaboration with scientists from the Francis Crick Institute, London (UK) and Charité, a leading university hospital in Berlin (Germany), has revealed an important mechanism of antimicrobial drug tolerance in microbial communities.

“Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become one of the leading causes of death, killing more than 1.2 million people every year worldwide. It happens when microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, viruses, parasites do not respond to drugs, which eventually leads to disease spread. Due to the global threat of AMR in the medical field, we need to investigate different possible mechanisms by which microorganisms gain resistance,” says Dr. Mohammad Tauqeer Alam, who is one of the senior authors of the study and an Assistant Professor of Systems Biology at the Department of Biology, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain.

“One of the well-known mechanisms by which microorganisms acquire resistance is by gaining drug resistance genes from the environment. In the current research, published in Nature Microbiology journal on 21 March 2022, the scientists have revealed an alternative mechanism that is driven by metabolic cooperation between members of the microbial community”, he added.

Dr. Alam clarified: “Analyzing microbiome data from more than 12,000 microbial communities, the study finds that 99.9% of the communities have auxotrophic species, which are genetically deficient cells and are incapable of growing alone. These auxotrophic species require cooperation from other genetically competent species”.

“The mathematical model, which is based on the metabolism of organisms, accurately predicts such cooperation. We then asked why would an organism which has all the necessary components for its survival shares essential compounds with other needy microorganisms? What would they gain from such cooperation”, says Dr. Alam.

The study has addressed this question and revealed that when microorganisms exchange cellular compounds within the community, they also secrete antimicrobial drugs at a higher rate as a side-effect. Due to this in-built metabolic cooperation mechanism, both types of interacting members of the community become tolerant to hundreds of antimicrobial drugs.

Dr. Alam would like to continue this research to examine how microbial interactions are associated with defining the structure of microbial communities, especially for complex disease-associated microbiomes. In future studies, Dr. Alam will address these questions by combining mathematical models with the data from microbiome experiments.