The high intrinsic penem resistance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa is due to the interplay among the outer membrane barrier, the active efflux system MexAB-OprM, and AmpC -lactamase. We studied the roles of two other efflux systems, MexCD-OprJ and MexXY-OprM, in penem resistance by overexpressing each system in an AmpC-and MexAB-OprM-deficient background and found that MexAB-OprM is the most important among the three efflux systems for extrusion of penems from the cell interior.Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a clinically significant pathogen exhibiting intrinsic and acquired resistance to various antimicrobial agents. This resistance is attributable to the limited permeability of the outer membrane and the extrusion of a wide variety of antibiotics from the cell interior by a tripartite multidrug efflux system, which is composed of membrane fusion protein-type periplasmic, resistance-nodulation-cell division-type inner-membrane, and outer-membrane efflux proteins (10). Among these efflux systems, 9,19) and 11,14) contribute to both intrinsic resistance and acquired resistance, while and MexEF-OprN (8) contribute only to acquired resistance in P. aeruginosa. Recently, Masuda et al. (12) reported the substrate specificities of MexAB-OprM, MexXY-OprM, and MexCD-OprJ. Although most antimicrobial agents are substrates of all three efflux systems, these systems have slight but significant differences in substrate specificities to -lactams. MexAB-OprM extrudes the broadest variety of -lactams, including penicillins, cephems, and meropenem-type carbapenems. MexXY-OprM and MexCD-OprJ extrude most penicillins but not carbenicillin, sulbenicillin, various cephems, and many carbapenems. Penem antibiotics display potent activities against a variety of gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria but not against P. aeruginosa (2,3,4,13,15,16,17,21,24). Studies with mutants that overproduce or lack MexAB-OprM demonstrated that this efflux system extrudes penem antibiotics (18). However, it is unclear whether MexXY-OprM and MexCD-OprJ extrude penem antibiotics.We compared the susceptibilities of a series of previously described isogenic AmpC-lacking mutants, each of which constitutively overexpressed an individual efflux pump (12, 18) ( Table 1). We used AmpC-lacking P. aeruginosa mutants because the presence of chromosomal AmpC -lactamase makes it difficult to interpret data on the MICs of -lactams, including penems, due to the interplay between -lactamase and the efflux system(s). The MICs of various penems, norfloxacin, and tetracycline for the mutants were determined by the twofold agar dilution method (23) with L agar with an inoculum of 10 4 cells. These results are shown in Table 2. Although the susceptibilities of the mutant KG5002, which lacked MexABOprM, MexCD-OprJ, and MexXY-OprM, to all penems tested were reduced by the overexpression of MexAB-OprM, MexCD-OprJ, or MexXY-OprM, as were those to norfloxacin and tetracycline, the degree of reduction resulting from the overexpression of MexAB-OprM (128-to 4,096-fold reduction ...