Searching for the Resistance Interactome of Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Abstract

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is one of the most important emerging Gram-negative pathogenic bacilli worldwide. The development of antibiotic resistance and its ability to adapt to multiple environmental conditions keep triggering alarms in global hospitals since the invasion of different types of tissues. This facultative anaerobe can adapt easily to aerobic or anaerobic conditions. It invades tissues, such as the lung, gastrointestinal tract, skin, renal system, and urinary tract, to the extreme of causing a variety of punctate gangrene. The considerable size of its genome (core and accessory genome) shows that this bacterium carries a huge battery of genes that allow it to develop resistance to various antibiotics, emerging as an MDR bacterium. The most studied mechanisms for resistance development have been quorum sensing and biofilm formation, among others. The research of resistance genes has been a long and time-consuming task. Genes such as CARB-3, CARB-4, PSE-1 (CARB-2), PSE-4 (CARB-1), OXA-18, OXA-2, OXA-21, OXA-10 (PSE-2), GyrA, GyrB, OprM, OprJ, OprN, MexB, MODx, MexF, and MexY, are among the best-characterized genes in P. aeruginosa. Another group of not-so-conventional genes is the methyltransferases, which have been negligible studied in P. aeruginosa. In this article, we propose to give a state of the art of the most important resistance genes of P. aeruginosa and their relationship with the interactome-resistome.