Antimicrobial Resistance and Genetic Elements in Bacteria

Dear Colleagues,

Antimicrobial resistance has been recognized as an emerging problem at the world scale. The emergence and spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria have a wide range of repercussions, particularly in the choice of appropriate antimicrobials in clinical field and anthropogenic activities such as farming. Hospital-acquired infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria have increasingly been reported over the last few decades, and in the absence of newly developed molecules, infections by multidrug-resistant bacteria are, in forthcoming years, expected to represent one of the leading causes of death. The upsurge of resistance is mainly due to the diffusion of resistance genes through the often excessive use of antimicrobials which operate a selection of both drug-resistant bacteria and genetic elements associated with antimicrobial resistance genes. Plasmids, transposons, insertion sequences, and integrons are among the genetic elements that more greatly contribute to the spread of antimicrobial resistance genes. These genetic elements allow a continuous intra- and intercellular dialogue among them and with chromosomes. Their mediated gene shuffling and horizontal transfer let bacteria shift their phenotypes to different antimicrobial resistances. The scope of this Special Issue is to collect original articles to update knowledge on the role played by different genetic elements in the spread of antimicrobial resistance among pathogenic and nonpathogenic bacteria. Manuscripts highlighting the role, in antimicrobial resistance, of genetic elements others than plasmids, transposons, insertion sequences, and integrons are also welcome. It is our pleasure to invite you to also submit review articles or short communications related to these topics.

Dr. Carlo Pazzani
Dr. Maria Scrascia
Guest Editors

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