Saturday, March 8, 2008

Screening for new antibiotic resistance genes

A recent article in PLoS ONE takes a broad look at antibiotic resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an environmental organism and a cause of opportunistic infections. Pseudomonas infections are particularly difficult to treat, as it is frequently resistant to numerous classes of antibiotics. Children who are predisposed to chronic colonization or infection with Pseudomonas, such as those with cystic fibrosis, may eventually harbor bacteria that are resistant to all available antibiotics. Fajardo et al. (citation below) screened two transposon libraries of P. aeruginosa looking for genes that either increased or decreased susceptibility to a panel of antibiotics. Their results are of interest, as many of their hits (genes associated with a change in susceptibility) were in classes of genes not previously linked to resistance. A weakness of the study is that they do not go on to make defined mutations in these genes or to complement the phenotype by expressing the mutated gene on a plasmid, but it is an interesting screen that has the potential to provide targets for future antimicrobial development.


Here is the PubMed link so that you can reach the PubMed Central version of the article if the PLoS ONE site continues to be slow.
ResearchBlogging.org
Fajardo, A., Martínez-Martín, N., Mercadillo, M., Galán, J.C., Ghysels, B., Matthijs, S., Cornelis, P., Wiehlmann, L., Tümmler, B., Baquero, F., Martínez, J.L., Falagas, M. (2008). The Neglected Intrinsic Resistome of Bacterial Pathogens. PLoS ONE, 3(2), e1619. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001619

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