Multidurg Resistant Enterobacterales: Mechanisms, Epidemiology and Diagnostics

Dear Colleagues,

The ongoing emergence and spread of multidrug-resistant Enterobacterales (MDR-E) are a global public health threat, leading to high morbidity and mortality as well as rising economic costs. They are a cause of serious bacterial infections in the community and among hospitalized patients, such as urinary tract infections (UTIs), bloodstream infections, nosocomial infections, and intra-abdominal human infections. For example, E. coli, a prominent pathogen within this family, is mostly associated with UTIs and is a notorious source of life-threatening MDR infections in cancer patients. Resistance is commonly caused by the production of different β-lactamases (e.g., extended-spectrum β-lactamases (ESBLs) and carbapenemases), sometimes in combination with other resistance mechanisms (e.g., porin loss, efflux). Moreover, mobile genetic elements play a critical role as vehicles in the spread and dissemination of such resistance genes among diverse bacterial populations in the hospital environment and to the community outside the hospitals, rendering antibiotics useless. As a result, by 2020, 127 countries were enrolled in the program “Global Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) and Use Surveillance System” created by the WHO in 2015, with the goal of standardizing AMR surveillance and evaluating AMR interventions worldwide. The delayed detection of resistance results in delaying efficient antibiotic therapy, clinical treatment failure, or delaying the isolation of the carriers of MDR bacteria and promoting outbreaks. However, these consequences can be avoided by rapid and accurate diagnostic tools that identify antibiotic-resistant bacteria, determine antimicrobial susceptibility to identify the possible antibiotic resistance, and consequently, assure the most effective treatment strategies.

This Special Issue seeks manuscript submissions reporting on:

• The epidemiology of multidrug resistant Enterobacterales isolated from different sources;
• The dynamics of antimicrobial resistance and genomic characteristics of MDR-E;
• The in vitro antimicrobial activity of novel antibiotics as well as old antibiotics, alone or in combination with other compounds against MDR-E;
• Therapeutic phage candidates for targeting MDR-E;
• The performance of novel phenotypic, immunological, molecular detection methods of MDR-E.

Dr. José Manuel Ortiz De La Rosa
Dr. Mustafa Sadek
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Antibiotics is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• multidrug-resistant Enterobacterales
• dissemination
• detection
• β-lactamases
• genomics