Advanced Strategies in Bacterial Antibiotic Resistance
A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Microbiology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2026 | Viewed by 14
Special Issue Editor
Interests: bacterial pathogens; antimicrobial resistance; virulence factors; molecular epidemiology; transmission; vaccines
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The relentless evolution of bacterial antibiotic resistance (AMR) constitutes a global health emergency, threatening modern medicine. They deploy sophisticated tactics—genetic mutations, adaptive evolution, and exploitation of mobile genetic elements (MGEs) like plasmids, transposons, and integrons—to acquire, optimize, and spread resistance. Understanding these bacterium-deployed tactics—their emergence, regulation, spread, and evolution—is fundamental to designing effective, next-generation countermeasures before our antimicrobial arsenal is rendered obsolete.
This Special Issue aims to gather cutting-edge research and comprehensive reviews that explores the novel and evolving tactics employed by bacteria to survive antibiotic pressure. It focuses on the molecular, genetic, and ecological strategies bacteria use to achieve and enhance resistance.
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Novel resistance mechanisms (enzymatic inactivation pathways, efflux pump variants, target site mutations, and permeability barriers).
- Emerging vectors (plasmids, ICEs, phages) and conditions facilitating the accelerated spread of resistance genes.
- Strategies like persister cell formation, transient tolerance induction, and population heterogeneity enabling survival under fluctuating antibiotic exposure.
- Global regulators, stress responses, metabolic adaptations, epistasis, and compensatory evolution fine-tune resistance and fitness.
- Enhanced resistance mechanisms unique to or amplified within biofilm communities.
Dr. Xuemei Yang
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- antibiotic resistance
- resistance mechanisms
- antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs)
- antibiotic tolerance
- heteroresistance
- horizontal gene transfer (HGT)
- compensatory evolution
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