Courses / Module

To introduce the students to antibiotic action and antibiotic resistance mechanisms and the tools used for both.

The series of lectures would start with a short introduction into how the antibiotics that we use today were discovered and developed over the past century. The next section introduces the students to the different classes of antibiotics, how they differ and how they interact with the bacteria to inhibit their growth or kill them. This section would also give an overview of the process within the bacteria e.g. cell wall synthesis. The following lectures would be a discussion of the different mechanisms of resistance and emerging resistance problems and epidemics of resistance currently of concern. The techniques used to measure antibiotic susceptibility or resistance in hospital laboratories and the molecular methods that we can now use would be described to highlight how a combination of phenotypic and molecular tools can aid the understanding of resistance. There will also be a section on the origins of antibiotic resistance and how resistance mechanisms may have entered the human food chain or other possible routes of transmission to human pathogens and the importance of human waste in the propagation of resistance in the water supply and environment. The module encompasses human, agricultural and environmental antibiotic use and resistance to discuss the problem from a One Health perspective.

Lecture content (two lectures for each topic):
1. Antibiotic history and discovery from 20th to 21st century (1 lecture).
2. Antibiotic classes, mode of action and bacterial inhibition or killing and mechanisms of antibiotic resistance (10 lectures).
3. Emerging antibiotic resistance problems and epidemics worldwide (3 lectures).
4. 4. Measuring antibiotic resistance (2 lectures).
One tutorial at the midway point to discuss any aspects of the course that the students wish to date.