Editorial: Reviews in antibiotic resistance and new antimicrobial drugs

Abstract

Editorial on the Research Topic Reviews in antibiotic resistance and new antimicrobial drugsAt the time of their discovery, antibiotics were considered a wonder drug for the treatment of bacterial infections, but the way microorganisms have involved several robust mechanisms to encounter the antibiotics has given rise to multi-drug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drugresistant (XDR) strains (Eichenberger and Thaden, 2019;Terreni et al., 2021;Yadav et al., 2022). There are several ways by which the pathogen acquires resistance to antibiotics, including genetic variation in the genome of the pathogen, unselective usage of antibiotics, the development of biofilms, etc (Santos-Lopez et al., 2019;Singh et al., 2019). Since it has become difficult to treat such infections, it is essential to understand the mechanism of the development of anti-microbial resistance (AMR) so that strategies to prevent such infections can be developed (Lomazzi et al., 2019;Hu et al., 2020;Moo et al., 2020).The goal of this Research Topic was to highlight recent advances in the field of antibiotic resistance while emphasising important directions and new possibilities for future inquiries. We anticipate the research being presented here will ignite conversations within the community about novel antimicrobial medications and antibiotic resistance, which will lead to the application of best practices in clinical, public health, and policy settings.Overall, four research articles and six review articles were published in this Research Topic. A research article published by Wang et al. reported the epidemiological studies of nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) in tuberculosis suspects in the southwest of China from 2017 to 2022. In this study, the main NTM isolates, MAC and M. chelonae/M. abscessus, were identified, and it was observed that the isolation rate of NTM in southwest China has shown an increasing trend in the last few years. The infected cases were elderly patients, individuals with compromised immune systems who had an HIV infection. On evaluation, it was observed that antibiotics like amikacin, moxifloxacin, clarithromycin, and linezolid demonstrated effective antibacterial activity against slow-growing mycobacteria, whereas linezolid and amikacin exhibited relatively better antibacterial activity against rapid-growing mycobacteria. Another research article published by Shi et al. studied the prevalence and resistance characteristics of MDR Streptococcus pneumoniae isolated from the respiratory tracts of hospitalised children in Shenzhen, China. It was observed that the non-vaccine serotype strains accounted for 46.6% of all the pneumococcal isolated strains. The multidrug resistance rates (MDR) of vaccine serotypes were 19F (99.36%), 19A (100%), 23F (98.08%), 6B (100%), and 6C (100%), and the MDR of non-vaccine serotypes were 15B (100.00%), 6EFrontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology frontiersin.org 01