Where is the selection effect coming from? You’d think that the human body is large enough to host a range of different bacteria, so unless they have some way of competing within the body, sterilization would just remove some bacterial populations rather than select for those resistant to antibiotics.
I’m not talking about sterilization of the human body but sterilization of the hospital enviroment. It leads to selection effects for bacteria that are adapted to the hospital enviroment.
If you have plants in a room then part of the room is filled with bacteria that interact with plants and that creates a more diverse microbial enviroment. Having plants in a room makes it more likely that a random bacteria in the room is a plant pathogen compared to a human pathogen.
I would expect that in 50 years you will have plants with microbiomes in hospitals that are selected for hosting a microbiome that increases the surrounding microbial diversity and not hosting human pathogens. Hospitals will move from the paradigm of “everything should be sterile” to the paradigm of “there should be a lot of microbial diversity without human pathogens”.
The will regularly test what bacteria are around and when there are problems use a mix of adding new bacteria to the enviroment that contribute to healthy microbial diversity and phage therapy against those bacteria that are unwelcome.
Having cheap ways to measure the microbial enviroment via cheaper gene sequencing will lead there but there will be a lot about how to have a good microbial enviroment that we have very little understanding of today.
Where is the selection effect coming from? You’d think that the human body is large enough to host a range of different bacteria, so unless they have some way of competing within the body, sterilization would just remove some bacterial populations rather than select for those resistant to antibiotics.
I’m not talking about sterilization of the human body but sterilization of the hospital enviroment. It leads to selection effects for bacteria that are adapted to the hospital enviroment.
If you have plants in a room then part of the room is filled with bacteria that interact with plants and that creates a more diverse microbial enviroment. Having plants in a room makes it more likely that a random bacteria in the room is a plant pathogen compared to a human pathogen.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2014.00491/full#B7 is a paper that for example argues for maintaining microbial diversity in the different environments as an important issue to avoid pathogen outbreaks.
I would expect that in 50 years you will have plants with microbiomes in hospitals that are selected for hosting a microbiome that increases the surrounding microbial diversity and not hosting human pathogens. Hospitals will move from the paradigm of “everything should be sterile” to the paradigm of “there should be a lot of microbial diversity without human pathogens”.
The will regularly test what bacteria are around and when there are problems use a mix of adding new bacteria to the enviroment that contribute to healthy microbial diversity and phage therapy against those bacteria that are unwelcome.
Having cheap ways to measure the microbial enviroment via cheaper gene sequencing will lead there but there will be a lot about how to have a good microbial enviroment that we have very little understanding of today.