Antimicrobial Resistance

Antimicrobial drugs underpin much of modern medicine. Bacteria, fungi, parasites and viruses that exhibit resistance to antimicrobials threaten the efficacy of therapeutics and impose significant global healthcare and economic burdens. In the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the emergence of pan-drug resistant bacterial and fungal infections in hospitals is a stark reminder of the looming antimicrobial resistance crisis.

That bacteria would develop resistance to antibiotics through mutation was predicted as early as the discovery of penicillin, but the observation of resistance gene transfer between strains in the 1950s heralded the beginning of a period of rapid discovery of resistance mechanisms. Research into the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance proceeded alongside the development of the field of molecular biology and the decades since have seen tremendous advances in our understanding. Still, there is much to learn about where, when and how multi-drug resistance evolves, which organisms are involved and how chains of transmission might be broken before clinicians are faced with intractable infections. Today, multidisciplinary research seeks to answer these questions and the latest advances in sequencing technologies and analysis capacities promise insights into the dynamics of resistance from single cells to complex microbial communities.

Guest-edited by Prof. Willem van Schaik and Dr. Robert Moran, this Antimicrobial Resistance special collection aims to highlight research on the emergence, accumulation and spread of antimicrobial resistance, with a particular focus on opportunistic pathogens and the mobile genetic elements therein.