The use of antibiotics in animal husbandry contributes to the worldwide problem of increasing antibiotic resistance in animal and human pathogens. Intensive animal production is considered an important source of antibiotic resistance genes released to the environment, while the contribution of smaller farms remains to be evaluated. Here we monitor the spread of tetracycline resistance (TC-r) ge...

The spread of antibiotic-resistant pathogens and their resistance traits is an epic global challenge, as recognized by various international bodies, including the G8 Science Ministry in 2013 and the Elmau summit in 2015 While most attention continues to be devoted to the clinic and the need to develop new drugs, there is growing recognition of the need to understand the origin and ecology of an...

Plasmodium falciparum malaria is subject to artificial selection from antimalarial drugs that select for drug-resistant parasites. We describe and apply a flexible new approach to investigate how epistasis, inbreeding, selection heterogeneity and multiple simultaneous drug deployments interact to influence the spread of drug-resistant malaria. This framework recognizes that different human 'env...

Resistance to erythromycin in Streptococcus pneumoniae was first detected in 1967 in the United States and subsequently worldwide (11, 20). The corresponding mechanism was rapidly identified as ribosomal methylation, which had been primarily reported as being responsible for erythromycin resistance in staphylococci (44). Further spread of resistance was then noted in a few countries, such as Fr...

Antibiotic resistance is now a linked global problem. Dispersion of successful clones of multidrug resistant (MDR) bacteria is common, often via the movement of people. Local evolution of MDR bacteria is also important under the pressure of excessive antibiotic use, with horizontal gene transfer providing the means by which genes such as bla(CTX-M) spread amongst different bacterial species and...

We develop a flexible, two-locus model for the spread of insecticide resistance applicable to mosquito species that transmit human diseases such as malaria. The model allows differential exposure of males and females, allows them to encounter high or low concentrations of insecticide, and allows selection pressures and dominance values to differ depending on the concentration of insecticide enc...

Foodborne illnesses continue to have an economic impact on global health care systems. There is a growing concern regarding the increasing frequency of antibiotic resistance in foodborne bacterial pathogens and how such resistance may affect treatment outcomes. In an effort to better understand how to reduce the spread of resistance, many research studies have been conducted regarding the metho...