Mechanisms of Resistance To -Lactam Antibiotics in Staphylococcus aureus
Abstract
S. aureus has shown a great power of adaptation to antimicrobial agents, acquiring, step-by step, resistance to all available antibiotics for treatment of the infections it causes. S. aureus has three major mechanisms of resistance to B-lactam antibiotics: enzyme mediated (penicillinase or B-lactamase) by which the antibiotic is inactivated; intrinsic resistance,which is not due to drug inactivation and accounts for methicillin resistance;and modifications of penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs). Additionally, S. aureus can express the tolerance phenomenon, in which there is a dissociation of the inhibitory and killing actions of â-lactam antibiotics. Of these, the most important mechanism is intrinsic resistance, which is probably more complex because several factors can affect its expression.
Copyright (c) 2010 Maribel Castellano González, Armindo Perozo Mena
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Kasmera journal is registered under a Creative Commons an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en; which guarantees the freedom to share-copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and adapt-remix, transform and build from the material, provided that the name of the authors, the Department of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, Zulia´s University and Kasmera Journal, you must also provide a link to the original document and indicate if changes have been made.
The Department of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, University of Zulia and Kasmera Journal do not retain the rights to published manuscript and the contents are the sole responsibility of the authors, who retain their moral, intellectual, privacy and publicity rights. The guarantee on the intervention of the manuscript (revision, correction of style, translation, layout) and its subsequent dissemination is granted through a license of use and not through a transfer of rights, which represents the Kasmera Journal and Department Infectious Diseases, University of Zulia are exempt from any liability that may arise from ethical misconduct by the authors.
Kasmera is considered a green SHERPA/RoMEO journal, that is, it allows self-archiving of both the pre-print (draft of a manuscript) and the post-print (the corrected and peer-reviewed version) and even the final version (layout as it will be published in the journal) both in personal repositories and in institutional and databases.