What causes antibiotic resistance in bacteria?
These notes are to introduce you to the problems of antibiotic resistance. Bacteria have evolved numerous strategies for resisting the action of antibiotics and antibacterial agents. This is particularly true of those bacteria that are antibiotic producers. Bacteria that produce antibiotics do so to gain a selective advantage over other, competing microbes in their natural environment. If they were sensitive to their own metabolic products, such a selective advantage would be lost. In many hospital units, exploitation of antibiotics is very intensive and this generates an enormous selective pressure for bacteria to acquire the means by which they may become antibiotic-resistant. Under such circumstances, it is not unusual to find that bacteria exhibit resistance to more than one group of antibiotics. More antibiotics are used in general medical and dental pracrice, maintaining selection pressure for resistance in the community. Resistance to a particular agent may be accomplished by mo
