Final Exam Flashcards
Natural and Producer Immunity
- bacteria making a poison and making sure that poison doesn’t kill the bacteria itself
Acquired resistance
- genetic transfer or point mutation from selective pressure from antibiotics
ESKAPE pathogens (in general)
- six pathogens with growing multi-drug resistance virulence
CRE (carbapenem-resistant enteriobacteriaceae) –> 1 mode of resistance
- have beta-lactamase that can destroy every b-lactam drug
- has NDM1 gene
fitness cost for resistance
- as resistance goes up, fitness goes down
- may need to turn to cocktails to combat resistance
typical gene mutation frequency of bacteria
- 1 in 10^7 bacteria
- resistance inevitable
Gaps in knowledge of antibiotic resistance
- no systematic international surveillance of antibiotic resistance threats
- have capacity to trace once something is of concern, but aren’t actively surveilling
- data on antibiotic use in human healthcare and in agriculture are not systematically collected
- programs to improve antibiotic prescribing are not widely used in the US (too much broad spectrum used)
- antibiotic stewardship could be the single most important action
- in clinical environment, these pathogens extremely opportunistic
Three major mechanisms of antibiotic resistance
- Modify the drug (i.e. beta-lactamases)
- Modify the target (v. specific to antibiotic but sometimes class of drug that acts similarly and modify their target to make the antibiotic inefficient)
- Pump drug out with efflux pumps (most general, greater likelihood than other mechs for resistance to more than one antibiotic)
Movement of resistance genes (2 broad categories, and subcategories in them)
- Selection for antibiotic resistance
- nature (protection against endogenous antibiotics etc)
- medicine (antibiotic consumption, pharma production)
- agriculture (antibiotic consumption, antibiotics onto fields)
- Spread of antibiotic resistance genes
- physical forces (wind, water - runoff and leaching)
- biological forces (human activities, insects, birds, animals)
Most antibiotics are (synthetics/natural products)
- natural products
- dont’ kill themselves via natural producer immunity
genus streptomyces antibiotics originally purified strains from _____
- soil
one of the major sources of antibiotics is _____
- now also looking in ______
- soil bacteria
- now looking in oceans (sponges)
Natural bacteria have natural resistance mechanisms to keep themselves alive which scientists have known about for a long time. When does this become a problem?
- when these mechs end up in human pathogens
- threat that these will jump to plasmid-mediated rapid transfer in human pathogens
Two super bugs.. how many drugs were they resistant to?
- 15 of 21 drugs
Average amt of drugs the 480 bacteria were resistant to naturally?
- 7 or 8
All 480 strains of soil-derived bacteria had resistance to some of these drugs.. why is this not as much of a problem
- these genes haven’t all jumped to human pathogens yet
May not be new mechanisms to target bacteria to kill… why?
- only a small fraction of genes in bacteria are vital to survival
antibiotic biosynthetic capability and efflux pumps
- like a megaoperon, all genes very close together and usually a self-resistant gene embedded into this, all turned on when there is a threat
- need a way that the antibiotic made by the bacteria doesn’t kill the producer strain (efflux pump)
- pump out the antibiotic to kill surrounding bacteria
- could still make antibiotic if PepT gene was dysfunctional, but build up of antibiotic in the cell would kill the host
Target modification example Streptomyces
- macrolide resistance: streptomyces modified its own 50S ribosome rRNA (ERM gene modification), became resistant to the antibiotic it was producing (erythromycin)
- this is currently just in non-virulent E. coli strains, would be dangerous in virulent strains
- erythromycin is selective to prokaryotic ribosomes, if it was for eukaryotic ribosomes as well, would be too toxic to use as a drug
- methylation had to coevolve with the biosynthesis of erythromycin in evolution, each step needs to be slightly greater fitness
What example does Lantibiotics go with?
- efflux pumps
- found in gram + bacteria
Which enzyme methylates streptomyces making it antibiotic resistant?
- ERM methyltransferase
Drug Target Modification example Vancomycin
- regulation of vanH, vanA, and vanX genes allows cell wall restructuring (from D-ala-D-ala to D-ala-D-lac)
- vancomycin cannot detect D-ala-D-lac (ester doesn’t have the hydrogen bond and cannot bond as well)
- whole connection of these 5 genes (VanR and VanS regulate) were transferred to a plasmid and to human pathogenic bacteria
- vancomycin used to be last line of defense, not anymore
Drug Modification example
- Strategy for self-protection by the oleandomycin producer:
- glycosylation of oleandomycin by Olel to inactivate the antibiotic
- export the antibiotic by an efflux pump and reactivate the antibiotic outside the bacteria by its own enzyme OleR
- used extracellularily as defense mechanism
Natural/Producer immunity… how did resistance mechanisms get there
- resistance mechs co-evolved with ability to produce antibiotics