Queens and Genes: Making Knowledge of Microbial Resistance

In microbial worlds, resistance is the response to selective pressures such as antibiotic environments. To understand microbial resistance scientists are acting as multispecies ethnographers seeking to narrate microbial worlds and tell the story of how and why microbial communities emerge as resistant. Microbial resistance as an object of study is called the resistome- the collection of genes within any given community of biota that encodes various abilities to resist and their mobilization potential within and across habitats. As a metaphor for understanding this process resistome scientists are thinking with the Black Queen Hypothesis (Morris et al, 2012), a reductive evolutionary theory premised on the card game Hearts to unpack mechanisms and practices used by microbial communities. While this knowledge is key in devising “next-generation” antibiotics for human consumption it also travels from the lab to do work in other spaces, such as in agricultural biotechnology where resistance has productive capacities. In this paper I follow the theories used by scientists to understand microbial evolution and the methods used to make microbial interactions knowable to tell the story of antimicrobial resistance as a microbial technology. Drawing on the work of resistome scientists, I will describe how “living with resistance” becomes an entangled pathway of queens, genes, and future imaginaries in complex ecological and agricultural systems.