Opportunistic pathogens are organisms that inflict immune compromised subjects. Due to the very opportunistic nature of the pathogens, their domains were restricted to the clinical settings. However, of late they have been associated with community acquired infections. Once upon a time, the pathogens were easily curbed by antibiotic therapy.

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Albeit, over the past decade antibiotic resistance among the opportunistic pathogenic bacteria have exhibited a drastic increase. Such an escalation has raised serious threat to the public health globally. Unprecedented increase in multidrug and extensive drug resistant opportunistic pathogens has reduced efficacy of  existing therapeutic options, thus starting a roll back trend in our fight against bacterial infections. The most significant in these are Enterococcus faecalis, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumanni, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter spp. The organisms have escaped almost all of the existing first line drugs. Out of these organisms members belonging to Enterobacteriacae viz. Klebsiella and Ennterobacter have been classified by WHO (2017) as 'high health care and high community care burden'.

 

Our lab is involved in the comparative study of multidrug-resistant environmental and clinical bacterial isolates. We work on Klebsiella pneumoniae and Enterobacter cloacae on different aspects of drug resistance. We utilize a combination of basic as well as high throughput techniques such as towards understanding novel antibiotic resistance mechanisms in these bacteria.