How CRISPR-Cas System Could Be Used to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance

Abstract

Rapid emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has made it harder for us to combat infectious diseases and to develop new antibiotics. The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats – CRISPR-associated (CRISPR-Cas) system, as a bacterial adaptive immune system, is recognized as one of the new strategies for controlling antibiotic-resistant strains. The programmable Cas nuclease of this system used against bacterial genomic sequences could be lethal or could help reduce resistance of bacteria to antibiotics. Therefore, this study aims to review using the CRISPR-Cas system to promote sensitizing bacteria to antibiotics. We envision that CRISPR-Cas approaches may open novel ways for the development of smart antibiotics, which could eliminate multidrug-resistant (MDR) pathogens and differentiate between beneficial and pathogenic microorganisms. These systems can be exploited to quantitatively and selectively eliminate individual bacterial strains based on a sequence-specific manner, creating opportunities in the treatment of MDR infections, the study of microbial consortia, and the control of industrial fermentation.

Keywords:

• antibiotic-resistant bacteria
• CRISPR-Cas system
• sequence-specific manner
• resensitization
• genome editing

Acknowledgment

We thank all staff of the DARC research center for all their support and collaboration. We also thank Imam Reza Hospital staff, Rohollah Safari, Laleh Jamali, and Ms Kalani, who helped us to get our goals for infection control.

Ethics and Consent Statement

All figures in this study are original and not reproduced from any other study.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.