engleski

Dynamic interplay between bacteria, antibiotics and antibiotic resistance determinants

Bacteria are unicellular organisms living in large multispecies communities in the environment, as symbionts or pathogens of multicellular organisms and as particularly abundant inhabitants of a human body. Environmental bacterial cells produce antibiotics that have been recognized as a potent tool to eradicate infectious diseases caused by pathogenic bacteria in humans and animals. Antibiotics have been in everyday use as weapons in the last seven decades, which has dramatically improved the quality of life and the lifespan of the average citizen. Unfortunately, widespread and often improper use of antibiotics has also caused rapid emergence and spreading of antibiotic resistance determinants, so today we are facing the antibiotic resistance as one of the top problems of public health. Ribosomal antibiotics that inhibit protein synthesis are constantly in focus of research not only because they can help us understand how the ribosome works, but because they are extremely effective against bacterial pathogens. It is therefore of a great importance to keep these antibiotics functional and find the way to block the resistance mechanisms. Keeping the pace with bacteria continues to be an immense challenge, both for the scientists that study mechanisms of antibiotic action and resistance and for pharmaceutical industry that uses these findings to create new antibiotics or to restore the potency of the old ones. All these efforts must, however, take into consideration the wealth of recent data that present bacteria in a different light - as social organisms that extensively communicate with each other and their hosts via numerous chemical signals. Furthermore, it is most intriguing that antibiotics at very low concentrations trigger the bacterial signaling response, thus revealing their so far neglected function they have in nature as signal molecules.

Antibiotics; antibiotic resistance; rRNA methyltransferases; inhibitors; quorum sensing

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