Fungi cause serious infections in the immunocompromised and debilitated, and the incidence of invasive mycoses has increased significantly over the last 3 decades. Slow diagnosis and the relatively few classes of antifungal drugs result in high attributable mortality for systemic fungal infections. Azole antifungals are commonly used for fungal infections, but azole resistance can be a problem ...

Overexpression of pleiotropic drug resistance (PDR) efflux pumps of the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter superfamily is the major cause of fungal multi-drug resistance and decreased efficacy of antifungal drugs. This review focused on recent progresses in understanding of the PDR efflux pumps of ABC transporter superfamily in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the fungal pathogens Candida albic...

Active efflux from procaryotic as well as eucaryotic cells strongly modulates the activity of a large number of antibiotics. Effective antibiotic transport has now been observed for many classes of drug efflux pumps. Thus, within the group of primary active transporters, predominant in eucaryotes, six families belonging to the ATP-binding cassette superfamily, and including the P-glycoprotein i...

ratory infection. It causes nosocomial infections in immunocompromised hosts. Recent studies indicate that an increasing percentage of Klebsiella strains are becoming resistant to multiple antimicrobial agents. In particular, infection with K. pneumoniae that are resistant against the b-lactams and fluoroquinolones are especially severe clinical problems. Furthermore, such resistant K. pneumoni...

For over 20 years, bacterial multidrug resistance (MDR) efflux pumps have been studied because of their impact on resistance to antimicrobials. However, critical questions remain, including why produce efflux pumps under non-antimicrobial treatment conditions, and why have multiple pumps if their only purpose is antimicrobial efflux? Salmonella spp. possess five efflux pump families, including ...

Efflux mechanisms have become broadly recognized as major components of resistance to many classes of antibiotics. Some efflux pumps selectively extrude specific antibiotics, while others, referred to as multidrug resistance (MDR) pumps, expel a variety of structurally diverse compounds with differing antibacterial modes of action. There are numerous potentially beneficial consequences of the i...

UNLABELLED Multidrug efflux pumps provide clinically significant levels of drug resistance in a number of Gram-negative hospital-acquired pathogens. These pathogens frequently carry dozens of genes encoding putative multidrug efflux pumps. However, it can be difficult to determine how many of these pumps actually mediate antimicrobial efflux, and it can be even more challenging to identify the ...

Inhibitors of drug efflux pumps have great potential as pharmacological agents that restore the drug susceptibility of multidrug resistant bacterial pathogens. Most attention has been focused on the discovery of small molecules that inhibit the resistance nodulation division (RND) family drug efflux pumps in Gram-negative bacteria. The prototypical inhibitor of RND-family efflux pumps in Gram-n...

We evaluated the contributions of Mycobacterium tuberculosis efflux pumps towards intrinsic resistance to different classes of peptidoglycan synthesis inhibitors (PSI). Our study indicates that the efflux pump knockout strains are more susceptible to PSI than the wild type. Vancomycin and ceftriaxone exhibited up to 3 log increased kill on efflux pump mutants compared to the wild-type strain, s...

Current biofuel production methods use engineered bacteria to break down cellulose and convert it to biofuel. A major challenge in microbial fuel production is that increasing biofuel yields can be limited by the toxicity of the biofuel to the organism that is producing it. Previous research has demonstrated that efflux pumps are effective at increasing tolerance to various biofuels. However, w...