Reader Comments
Post a new comment on this article
Post Your Discussion Comment
Please follow our guidelines for comments and review our competing interests policy. Comments that do not conform to our guidelines will be promptly removed and the user account disabled. The following must be avoided:
- Remarks that could be interpreted as allegations of misconduct
- Unsupported assertions or statements
- Inflammatory or insulting language
Thank You!
Thank you for taking the time to flag this posting; we review flagged postings on a regular basis.
closeAn interesting set of experiments with both strengths and weaknesses.
Posted by Adam on 10 Mar 2008 at 00:26 GMT
Comment originally posted by me at gramstain.blogspot.com:
A recent article in PLoS ONE takes a broad look at antibiotic resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an environmental organism and a cause of opportunistic infections. Pseudomonas infections are particularly difficult to treat, as it is frequently resistant to numerous classes of antibiotics. Children who are predisposed to chronic colonization or infection with Pseudomonas, such as those with cystic fibrosis, may eventually harbor bacteria that are resistant to all available antibiotics. Fajardo et al. (citation below) screened two transposon libraries of P. aeruginosa looking for genes that either increased or decreased susceptibility to a panel of antibiotics. Their results are of interest, as many of their hits (genes associated with a change in susceptibility) were in classes of genes not previously linked to resistance. A weakness of the study is that they do not go on to make defined mutations in these genes or to complement the phenotype by expressing the mutated gene on a plasmid, but it is an interesting screen that has the potential to provide targets for future antimicrobial development.