Origins and Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotics have always been considered one of the wonder discoveries of the 20th century. This is true, but the real wonder is the rise of antibiotic resistance in hospitals, communities, and the environment concomitant with their use. The extraordinary genetic capacities of microbes have benefitted from man's overuse of antibiotics to exploit every source of resistance genes and every means of horizontal gene transmission to develop multiple mechanisms of resistance for each and every antibiotic introduced into practice clinically, agriculturally, or otherwise. This review presents the salient aspects of antibiotic resistance development over the past half-century, with the oft-restated conclusion that it is…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• CN
  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
• UO
  University of British Columbia
• NI
  National Institutes of Health
• CI
  Canadian Institutes of Health Research