Membrane Proteomics has emerged as a Tool to Study Carbapenem Resistance in Acinetobacter baumannii

Abstract

Copyright: © 2014 Tiwari V. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Acinetobacter baumannii is one of the most important opportunistic pathogens described by Infectious Disease Society of America [1]. Due to its lethality, it is grouped into ESKAPE pathogens (group of hospital-acquired infection causing pathogens). Reports on the ESKAPE pathogen showed that more people now die in US due to the ESKAPE pathogen infections than of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis combined [2,3]. Acinetobacter baumannii has emerged as a threat to soldiers, wounded during military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan [4,5] as well as isolated from natural resources [6]. It causes pneumonia, urinary tract infections and respiratory infections. Acinetobacter baumannii has ability to survive on artificial surfaces and utilize ethanol as a carbon source [7], resist desiccation, grow at various temperatures and pH conditions [8] this make it a notorious pathogen. Prevalence of Acinetobacter baumannii in clinical setup increases with time [9]. Carbapenems are most commonly prescribed β-lactam against A. baumannii [10]. Emergence of resistance against carbapenem is a significant health problem & associated with high morbidity & mortality [11] which makes it one of the major concerns [9,12,13].