Antimicrobial Resistance and Drug Design—a Themed Issue in Honor of Professor Kim Lewis
A special issue of Antibiotics (ISSN 2079-6382). This special issue belongs to the section "Novel Antimicrobial Agents".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (29 February 2024) | Viewed by 20730
Special Issue Editor
Interests: antibiotic resistance and discovery; multidrug efflux; drug permeation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue will honor Prof. Kim Lewis for his outstanding contributions in the fields of bacterial physiology, antibiotic discovery, and mechanisms of antibiotic resistance. Dr. Lewis is the University Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at the Northeastern University in Boston, MA. Dr. Lewis is also a Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a member of the Faculty 1000 Pharmacology & Drug Discovery section.
Dr. Lewis is a graduate of Moscow University, USSR (M.S., Ph.D.) and completed a brief postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 1988, he accepted his first faculty position as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biology of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. During his time at MIT, Dr. Lewis made a ground-breaking discovery of the first ever bacterial efflux pump, the Escherichia coli EmrAB. Curiously, this discovery was made while he was looking for the mechanism of electron coupling in the respiratory chain using proton uncouplers, a bioenergetics interest from his graduate studies in Prof. Vladimir Skulachev’s lab. The increasing concentrations of the uncoupler CCCP led to the selection of resistant mutants that overproduced EmrAB responsible for the active efflux of this compound across the outer membrane. In 2001, Dr. Lewis has joined the Department of Biology at Northeastern University in Boston as Full Professor where he developed an interdisciplinary and highly recognized program on antibiotic resistance and discovery. The Discovery of new antibiotics is a difficult task, because screening for antibiotics from soil actinomycetes (the major producers of several clinical antibiotics) eventually became redundant with the same active chemotypes rediscovered multiple times, and because bacteria always find a way to resist antibiotics. Dr. Lewis found solutions to these hurdles and discovered novel antibiotics, for which selection of resistance is not easily achievable. He developed a technology to grow uncultured bacteria, which constitute 99% of all microbial diversity and tapped the diversity of their secondary metabolisms to discover teixobactin, lassomycin and darobactin, the antibiotics with new mechanisms of action. Dr. Lewis’s interest in the recalcitrance of chronic infections with biofilms to antibiotic treatments led to the rediscovery of persisters and characterization of the principal mechanism of persister formation and the role of persisters in the tolerance of biofilms to antibiotics.
Dr. Lewis’s current research interest, in his own words, is in the “mining of natural antimicrobiome to discover a perfect antibiotic, if it exists”. He has published more than 270 scientific papers with 46000+ citations. Dr. Lewis’s work is recognized by multiple awards, and he was recently selected as the 2023 ASM recipient of the Applied Biology and Biotechnology Research Award. He continues to push the frontier of bacteriology and because of his extraordinary efforts “where the frontier of science once was, is now the centre” (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg). I am honored and pleased to invite you to submit a publication for this Special Issue.
Prof. Dr. Helen I. Zgurskaya
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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Keywords
- antibiotics
- mechanism of action
- persisters
- biofilms
- uncultured bacteria
- antibiotic resistance
- multidrug efflux
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