Author(s) :

Muhammad Azam, Muhammad Sajid, Zahra, Ambreen Shafique, Farooq Ahmad.

Volume/Issue :

Abstract :

The emergence of new antibiotic-resistant opportunistic pathogenic soil microorganisms, such as Acinetobacter spp., along with the rise of newly developed opposition mechanisms, like in enterococci there is glycopeptide resistance, as well as host chromosome or plasmid-borne gene mutations encoding extended-spectrum β-lactamases or DNA gyrase, and the dissemination of previously identified resistance genes into previously uniformly susceptible bacterial hosts, are the four main mechanisms explaining the development of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, correlated with drug use. Formerly, it was believed that only closely related bacteria were capable of such genetic transmission, despite early findings showing antibiotic resistance genes commonly within transposable elements and self-transferable plasmids. This review will focus on two novel concepts: (i) conjugation as a widespread genetic information transfer mechanism; and (ii) the transmission of antibiotic resistance genes occurring among phylogenetically distinct bacterial genera in their natural habitats, particularly between gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria.

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