Mechanisms of Antibiotic Action and Resistance

Dear Colleagues,

It is with great pleasure that I announce a new Pharmaceuticals Special Issue on ‘Mechanisms of Antibiotic Action and Resistance’.

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest challenges to global health, and despite recent efforts to develop new antibiotics and slow the spread of resistance, the problem persists. It is beyond question that new drugs and novel approaches are needed to tackle the antimicrobial resistance problem and prevent a fallback into a pre-antibiotic era. Novel mechanisms of action that are not yet clinically exploited and new approaches to kill bacteria, e.g., through phage infection, are frequently promoted as attractive solutions to the problem. Conversely, one may argue that it is a safer bet to stick with antimicrobial targets that have already been proven to be highly successful, either in the clinical setting, such as cell wall synthesis, or generally in nature, such as the cytoplasmic membrane. Other approaches may aim at inactivating resistance mechanisms or sensitizing bacteria by weakening their ability to adapt to antibiotic stress. As different as these approaches may be, what they all have in common is that in order to use them to their full potential, we have to better understand the complex mechanisms that underlie antibiotic action, antibiotic resistance, and stress adaptation.

This Special Issue aims at establishing a collection of papers exploring the mechanistic diversity of antibiotic action and bacterial adaptation strategies. We therefore invite submission of articles that shed light on this complex topic. We particularly encourage the submission of articles covering the mechanisms of novel antibiotic molecules, new insights into mechanisms of established antibiotics, mechanisms of drug interactions such as synergy and antagonism, antibiotic resistance and adaptation mechanisms including stress responses, new approaches to inhibit bacterial growth directly or to impair, e.g., fitness, virulence, or pathogenicity, as well as tools to study such mechanisms. Studies on non-bacterial microbial pathogens and antimicrobials in a broader sense are welcome. We are looking forward to receiving both original research and review articles on this exciting research topic.

Dr. Michaela Wenzel
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Pharmaceuticals is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.