Bacterial Multidrug Efflux Proteins in Antimicrobial Resistance

Dear Colleagues,

Antimicrobial resistance in bacteria is a global challenge to human and animal health. A major mechanism of antimicrobial resistance is provided by bacterial multidrug efflux proteins. These transport proteins, also known as efflux pumps, actively extrude harmful compounds (e.g., antibiotics) from the bacterial cell membrane and/or cytoplasm. Efflux proteins are present in all bacteria and are highly conserved, indicating ancient origins and essential roles before the antibiotic era, and they contribute to intrinsic, acquired, and phenotypic resistance of bacterial pathogens.

To better understand bacterial multidrug efflux proteins and to discover or develop chemical compounds and strategies to inhibit their function, it is important to study their occurrence and distribution, especially in pathogenic bacteria, and their regulation, structures, ligand interactions, and molecular mechanisms. Seven different families of bacterial multidrug efflux proteins are identified (ABC, RND, MFS, SMR, MATE, PACE, AbgT) with various degrees of characterization [1].

This Special Issue invites articles on the theme of Bacterial Multidrug Efflux Proteins, including methods, strategies, and results on studying their occurrence, distribution and regulation, cloning and amplified expression, purification and reconstitution, activity assays, elucidating structure and molecular mechanism, ligand interactions, and compound screening using various chemical, biochemical, biophysical, and computational approaches.

[1] Ahmad I, Nawaz N, Dermani FK, Kohlan AK, Saidijam M, Patching SG. Bacterial multidrug efflux proteins: A major mechanism of antimicrobial resistance. Curr Drug Targets 2018;19(9):1-13. DOI: 10.2174/1389450119666180426103300.

Prof. Dr. Simon G. Patching
Guest Editor

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