Antimicrobial resistance is one of the greatest risks facing the world’s population in the coming decades. It is estimated that infections caused by antibiotic-resistant pathogens contribute to around 5 million deaths per year worldwide.
Bacterial pathogens have a broad spectrum of resistance mechanisms to different antimicrobial therapeutic strategies, which makes the development of new antibacterials very challenging. Discovering and understanding new mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance may help to generate strategies for the discovery of new antibiotics. To date, the effect of low-radiation environments on the activity of antimicrobial compounds has never been studied.
The hypothesis of this proposal is that, in low radiation environments, the molecular mechanisms that bacterial pathogens have evolved to counteract radiation aggressions would be redundant and this could affect the activity of antibiotics, so the aim is to demonstrate whether commonly used antibiotics and antimicrobial molecules would have differential activity against different pathogens in low radiation environments compared to their surface activity.