Antimicrobial resistance mechanisms: using examples from gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria

Abstract

The discovery of antibiotics has undoubtedly helped humans in the battle against bacteria, but the artificial misuse of antibiotics in our industries and medical systems has unintentionally provided the ideal environmental stress for bacteria to exploit and exchange their potential resistance genes through mutations and gene transfer respectively, resulting in the emergence of antimicrobial resistant bacteria and the ineffectiveness of various antibiotics. To date, this has proven to be an urgent and important issue to the global healthcare system, resulting in increasing death cases. Therefore, more and more resources are invested to study their different resistant mechanisms and develop corresponding novel drugs and treatment methods. This review briefly introduces several key resistance mechanisms with examples of both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria, the current and further methods for treating multiple drug-resistant bacteria and the potential actions that could be done to improve the situation.