This is Scientific Americans' 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Huffman.

Hedgehogs are a lot of things. They're small and spiky, covered in quills, and some people

even say they're cute. Now, a new study says that they are also the origin of resistance

to methacillin, an antibiotic derived from penicillin. That pointed observation appears

in the journal Nature. Antibiotic resistance is a huge clinical problem, and methacillin

resistance staphlococcus orias, otherwise known as MRSA or MRSA, can be difficult to treat

as many have developed resistance to a handful of our frontline therapeutics.

Historically, it has been assumed that resistance in disease-causing bacteria, including staph

errors, is a modern phenomenon driven by clinical use of antibiotics.

Jasper Larsen is a senior scientist at the Staten's Serum Institute in Copenhagen,

which is the Danish equivalent of the CDC in the US.

Methacillin resistance was thought to be tied to prescription, in part because methacillin

resistant bugs were first isolated from British hospitals just a year after the drug became

available for clinical use.

But a couple of years ago, we found out by chance that McCMIC is present in more than 60%

of hijacks from Denmark and Sweden.

Okay, what's McCMIC's MRSA? Methacillin and penicillin belong to the so-called beta-lactam

family of antibiotics. They kill bacteria by inhibiting enzymes the bugs used to build their

protective cell walls. McCMIC and a related gene, McA, encode versions of the enzymes that

the antibiotics don't latch onto as well.

Staph errors bacteria can and these genes are therefore resistant to most beta-lactam

antibiotics. But where did these resistance genes come from? They've been spotted not only in

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