Antivirulence agents inhibit the production of disease-causing virulence factors but are neither bacteriostatic nor bactericidal. Antivirulence agents against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strain USA300, the most widespread community-associated MRSA strain in the United States, were discovered by virtual screening against the response regulator AgrA, which acts as a transcr...

Life-threatening infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria are becoming increasingly difficult to treat. There is growing interest in exploiting bacteriophages (or phages) combat bacterial infections. Phages often target surface structures that may also be important for virulence. Upon phage challenge, these molecules lost or modified, resulting resistance and possibly phenotypical conv...

The continuing emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens is a concern to human health and highlights the urgent need for the development of alternative therapeutic strategies. Quorum sensing (QS) regulates virulence in many bacterial pathogens, and thus, is a promising target for antivirulence therapy which may inhibit virulence instead of cell growth and division. This means that there is li...

The growing threat of antibiotic resistance necessitates the development of novel antimicrobial therapies. Antivirulence agents that target group-beneficial traits in microorganisms (i.e., phenotypes that help the cells surrounding the producer cell instead of selfishly benefiting only the producer cell) represent a new antimicrobial approach that may be robust against the spread of resistant m...

Pathogens deploy an arsenal of virulence factors (VFs) to establish themselves within their infectious niche. The discovery of antimicrobial compounds and their development into therapeutics has made a monumental impact on human and microbial populations. Although humans have used antimicrobials for medicinal and agricultural purposes, microorganism populations have developed and shared resista...

The evolution of bacterial pathogens from nonpathogenic ancestors is marked principally by the acquisition of virulence gene clusters on plasmids and pathogenicity islands via horizontal gene transfer. The flip side of this evolutionary force is the equally important adaptation of the newly minted pathogen to its new host niche. Pathoadaptive mutations take the form of modification of gene expr...

Acinetobacter baumannii is a major human pathogen associated with multidrug-resistant nosocomial infections; its virulence is attributed to quorum-sensing-mediated biofilm formation, and disruption of biofilm formation is an attractive antivirulence strategy. Here, we report the first successful demonstration of biofilm disruption in a clinical isolate of A. baumannii S1, using a quorum-quenchi...