Multidrug Resistance & MRSA - the pump effect

Link: Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

Very technical but it basically means that some strains of MRSA can pump the drugs out that are sent to kill them

Efflux is an important mechanism of multidrug resistance (MDR) in bacteria. The multidrug and toxin extrusion (MATE) family is the most recently described group of MDR efflux proteins, none of which have previously been identified in Staphylococcus aureus. Two independently derived S. aureus mutants having efflux-related MDR phenotypes were studied using microarray technology and a marked overexpression of an open reading frame (ORF; mepA) encoding a protein homologous with MATE family proteins was observed in both.