Most people think that antibiotics are deadly for bacteria, which their name implies. While this is generally true, there are actually hundreds of germs in soil than eat antibiotics for lunch, and they thrive on them, scientists have found. The research was published in the journal Science and has involved samples of soil taken from 11 sites.

"Many bacteria in many different soil isolates can not only tolerate antibiotics, they can actually live on them as their sole source of nutrition," said George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston on the journal Science's website.

Church and his team have found the startling phenomenon somewhat incidentally, while searching for organisms in the soil that remove toxins from cellulose. The team led by Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church had (and still has) a Department of Energy grant to develop ways to create biofuels from agriculture waste. Out of curiosity they also tried to test the bacteria on antibiotics, after good results with cellulose. They were surprised to see that instead of dying or at least reducing their numbers, the bacteria started to grow on the antibiotics.

"We could find ... bacteria that could grow on almost all of them [antibiotics]," Church said. The new findings are both interesting and startling. It could well mean that humans may get one day infections with bacteria that are not only immune to antibiotics, but they can well feed on them.

On the other hand, the antibiotics-eating bacteria explain why there is so little of the germ "killers" in soil despite abuse from both humans and animals. Bacteria are also used to clean up oil and other substances usually thought of as toxic.