Opportunistic pathogens: pathogenesis and multi-drug resistance mechanisms

About this Research Topic

Background

The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as one of the most critical global public health threats. At least 4.95 million people death was caused by AMR in 2019. Even worse, its potential economic impact is estimated to reach a staggering $100 trillion due to AMR in the next thirty years (https://www.who.int/health-topics/antimicrobial-resistance).

Researching the development of antibiotic resistance and exploring ways to prevent, detect and treat antimicrobial resistant infections have been prioritized in the medical microbiology field. AMR mechanisms have been uncovered on many Enterobacteriaceae and Gram-positive bacteria, such as Enterococcus faecium and Staphylococcus aureus, due to their clinical significance and diverse resistance mechanisms.

Unfortunately, the opportunistic pathogens have been overlooked in the clinics because they are often identified as normal flora or common environmental organisms in human specimens. Opportunistic pathogens may have low pathogenicity while they can often cause serious infections in immunocompromised patients and lead to outbreak in the healthcare settings. They may even lead to diseases in healthy individuals if being introduced into hosts system by traumatization. Management of such infections is often challenging due to the lack of guidelines/standards for antibiotic susceptibility tests as well as multi-drug resistance (MDR).
Lately, diseases linked to non-pathogenic microorganisms are becoming more common under typical conditions, such as Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, Elizabethkingia spp., Acinetobacter baumannii and many others.

This Research Topic focuses on the novel emerging opportunistic pathogens and their resistance mechanisms. Attention is given to genome analysis, transcriptomic analysis, genome epidemiology, evolution, and virulence factor identification.

This Research Topic covers, but is not limited to, the following subtopics:

1. Characterization of novel antibiotic resistance mechanisms in opportunistic pathogens (Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, Elizabethkingia spp., and Acinetobacter baumannii and related bacteria).
2. Genomic epidemiology of antibiotic-resistant opportunistic pathogens (Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, Elizabethkingia spp., and Acinetobacter baumannii and related bacteria).
3. Molecular identification of opportunistic pathogens such as Elizabethkingia spp. isolated from patients or environment.
4. The colonization and invasion mechanisms of MDR opportunistic pathogens in and on human infection sites.

We welcome the submission of Original Research articles, Brief Research Reports, Reviews and Mini-Reviews.

Frontiers in Microbiology does not publish genome announcements and this collection will not consider descriptive studies which report on sequencing data unless they are accompanied by a clear hypothesis and experimentation and provide insight into the microbiological system or process being studied.

Keywords: Opportunistic pathogens, Multi-drug resistant, Resistance mechanisms, Host defense, Horizontal gene transfer, Regulatory systems

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