Efflux-mediated antimicrobial resistance

Abstract

Efflux, or the energy-dependent export or exclusion of antimicrobials from bacterial cells was first reported in the early 1980s and is now recognized as an increasingly important determinant of resistance in bacterial pathogens [275, 276]. Bacterial efflux systems capable of accommodating antimicrobials generally fall into five classes: (1) the major facilitator (MF) superfamily, (2) the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) family, (3) the resistance-nodulation-division (RND) family, (4) the small multidrug resistance (SMR) family [a member of the much larger drug/metabolite transporter (DMT) superfamily] and (5) the multidrug and toxic compound extrusion (MATE) family [289].