Abstract
Staphylococcus aureus is a clinically important pathogen mainly causing hospital borne infections. These bacterial infections range from mild skin infections to serious health threats like endocarditis, osteomyelitis, and pneumonia. Few strains have developed resistance against antibiotics used to treat S. aureus infections and are termed as Methicillin Resistant S. aureus strains. The pathogen releases Auto Inducing Peptides to establish cell density dependent inter-cell communication, also known as quorum sensing (QS). QS results in the expression of accessory gene regulator system. It causes successful biofilm formation and enhanced expression of toxins. QS mediated biofilm formation provides an additional resistance against the antibiotics used. An innovative therapeutic approach has been studied vastly in last decade to deal with severe infections using specific QS inhibitors (QSIs). This chapter comprehensively describes the QSIs studied to control the infections caused by S. aureus strains.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by J C Bose Fellowship (SERB) to YS and Research Grant by University of Delhi. NK is UGC-SRF. HG is Masters of Science in Zoology from University of Delhi. ND is Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Fellow (CSIR-SRF) and Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellow (2015–16) at NIAID NIH.
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The authors declare no competing financial interests. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to YS (ysinghdu@gmail.com).
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Kumar, N., Gupta, H., Dhasmana, N., Singh, Y. (2018). Combating Staphylococcal Infections Through Quorum Sensing Inhibitors. In: Kalia, V. (eds) Biotechnological Applications of Quorum Sensing Inhibitors. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-9026-4_15
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