Abstract

The rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogenic bacteria poses a global public health threat. Beyond clinical settings, antibiotic resistance genes are widespread in various bacterial populations in the environment. To comprehend the development of antibiotic resistance in pathogens, it is crucial to explore significant reservoirs of resistance genes, which may include determinants providing self-resistance in soil bacteria producing antibiotics and genes encoding intrinsic resistance mechanisms in non-producing environmental bacteria. Although the presence of resistance determinants in soil and environmental bacteria doesn't initially endanger human health, the potential transfer of these genes to pathogenic bacteria through mechanisms like plasmids and integrons could lead to substantial problems. Therefore, there is an urgent need to investigate the distribution of resistance determinants, elucidate resistance mechanisms, and identify environmental factors promoting their spread. This review delves into self-resistance mechanisms in Streptomyces, producer soil bacteria, and examines the interplay between resistance determinants in producer soil bacteria, non-producer environmental bacteria, and clinical isolates. Overall, this article presents a conceptual framework for understanding the intricacies of antibiotic resistance emergence in clinical settings. Access to such knowledge is essential for researchers to construct models depicting the dissemination of resistance genes and to develop interventions preventing the recruitment of additional genes into pathogens.