There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Antimicrobial drug resistance is threatening to take us to the “pre‐antibiotic era”,
where people are dying from preventable and treatable diseases and the risk of hospital‐associated
infections compromises the success of surgery and cancer treatments. Development of
new antibiotics is slow, and alternative approaches to control infections have emerged
based on insights into metabolic pathways in host–microbe interactions. Central carbon
metabolism of immune cells is pivotal in mounting an effective response to invading
pathogens, not only to meet energy requirements, but to directly activate antimicrobial
responses. Microbes are not passive players here—they remodel their metabolism to
survive and grow in host environments. Sometimes, microbes might even benefit from
the metabolic reprogramming of immune cells, and pathogens such as Candida albicans
, Salmonella Typhimurium and Staphylococcus aureus can compete with activated host
cells for sugars that are needed for essential metabolic pathways linked to inflammatory
processes. Here, we discuss how metabolic interactions between innate immune cells
and microbes determine their survival during infection, and ways in which metabolism
could be manipulated as a therapeutic strategy.
[1
]Infection and Immunity Program and the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular
Biology Biomedicine Discovery Institute Monash University Clayton Vic. Australia