Pseudomonas aeruginosa: all roads lead to resistance

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is often resistant to multiple antibiotics and consequently has joined the ranks of ‘superbugs’ due to its enormous capacity to engender resistance. It demonstrates decreased susceptibility to most antibiotics due to low outer membrane permeability coupled to adaptive mechanisms and can readily achieve clinical resistance. Newer research, using mutant library screens, microarray technologies and mutation frequency analysis, has identified very large collections of genes (the resistome) that when mutated lead to resistance as well as new forms of adaptive resistance that can be triggered by antibiotics themselves, in in vivo growth conditions or complex adaptations such as biofilm growth or swarming motility.