UC Irvine

Antibiotic resistant pathogens cause more than 2.8 million infections and 35000 deaths in the United States each year. We need unique and effective therapies that will eradicate bacterial colonization, reduce patient suffering, and improve our ability to deliver necessary medications with reduced complications. Unfortunately, making new classes of antibiotics will not solve the antibiotic resistant problem.Bacteria face different stressful conditions which have an adverse effect on the physiological welfare of bacterial cells. Stress response mechanisms protect cells against stress and make them tolerant to antibiotics. As a result, tolerant cells might be a source of resistance. Targeting the stress response mechanisms can be a good tool to prevent tolerance. Throughout this research, different analytical and characterization methods were used to investigate different stress responses from pathogens in different environmental conditions. Additionally, the effects of stress response mechanisms on making cells tolerant to antibiotics was studied. Consequently, this approach was used to develop some strategies for preventing infection. For example, a small molecule was found to be effective against bacterial survival in some stressful environments, and one type of probiotic strain was used to interact with pathogens and prevent the growth by using its stress response mechanism. Using this knowledge, we can find the ways tolerance arises to target mechanisms of tolerance to combat antibiotic resistance as a more time saving strategy.