When was antibiotic resistance first discovered

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Citation: Aminov RI A brief history of the antibiotic era: lessons learned and challenges for the future. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited. Besides, microorganisms are held to strong selective pressures, due to the indiscriminate use of antibiotics which cause multiresistant strains.

In the same way, these ARM microorganisms are able to transfer their resistant genic pool to other strains or sensitive species to antibiotics by different HGT mechanisms as transduction, transformation and conjugation. HGT can be presented in different auspicious environments as health attention centers where different types of infections are treated and their different origins increasing the HGT potential.

The increase of HAI is originated for multiple factors, most of them, avoidable. Unfortunately, in many HGT cases, infections are originated by multiresistant microorganisms, even to last generation antibiotics, increasing the morbidity and mortality around the world. In a consistent way with the alarms of the WHO, the studies related to ARM must be increased as well the respective restrictions of antibiotics usage, mainly in developing countries as the ones of South-America.

Davies J, Davies D. Origins and evolution of antibiotic resistance. Microbiology and molecular biology reviews. Aminov RI. A brief history of the antibiotic era: lessons learned and challenges for the future.

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Metabolism and microbial pathogenesis. Trends in microbiology. Kondrashov FA. Gene duplication as a mechanism of genomic adaptation to a changing environment. Antimicrobials as promoters of genetic variation. This became the first modern antibiotic, although Ehrlich himself referred to his discovery as 'chemotherapy' — the use of a chemical to treat a disease. The word 'antibiotics' was first used over 30 years later by the Ukrainian-American inventor and microbiologist Selman Waksman, who in his lifetime discovered over 20 antibiotics.

Alexander Fleming was, it seems, a bit disorderly in his work and accidentally discovered penicillin. Upon returning from a holiday in Suffolk in , he noticed that a fungus, Penicillium notatum , had contaminated a culture plate of Staphylococcus bacteria he had accidentally left uncovered.

The fungus had created bacteria-free zones wherever it grew on the plate.