antibiotic resistance

Penicillins are an important group of antibiotics used to treat various types of infections caused by Gram-positive bacteria. So far, the blaZ gene was the only known β-lactamase gene in staphylococci. However, other putative β-lactamases were identified, and one of them was shown to be a novel functional β-lactamase encoded by bla_ARL in ...

Antibiotic resistance in bacterial pathogens is a major public health concern. This work was motivated by the observation that only a small proportion of ST95 isolates, a major pandemic lineage of extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli, have acquired antibiotic resistance, in contrast to many other pandemic lineages. Understanding bacterial genetic factors that may...

Our antibiotic arsenal is becoming depleted, in part, because bacteria have the ability to rapidly adapt and acquire resistance to our best agents. The SOS pathway, a widely conserved DNA damage stress response in bacteria, is activated by many antibiotics and has been shown to play central role in promoting survival and the evolution of resistance under antibiotic stress. As a result, targeting the SOS response has been proposed as an...

Enterococcus faecalis is a bacterium that normally inhabits the gastrointestinal tracts of humans and other animals. Although these bacteria are members of our native gut flora, they can cause life-threatening infections in hospitalized patients. Antibiotic resistance genes appear to be readily shared among high-risk...