Wei Wang

Séamus Fanning

Yujie Hu

Guerrino Macori

Scott Van Nguyen

Fengqin Li

With the expansion of the breeding production scale and the development of the food industry, the prevalence of foodborne pathogens and subsequent problems including food poisoning and antimicrobial resistance (AMR), contribute much to the global disease burden, leading to the serious health hazard and major economic losses around the world, and foodborne disease has become one of the most challenging issues to public health. The most common pathogens spreading foodborne diseases in humans include but are not limited to Salmonella, Campylobacter, Clostridium, Cronobacter, pathogenic Escherichia coli, Listeria monocytogenes, Staphylococcus aureus, Vibrio parahaemolyticus, Bacillus cereus, Yersinia enterocolitica, etc. These pathogens contaminate various types of foods throughout the food chain including cereal, vegetable, fruit, meat, dairy, and aquatic products in entire proceedings from farmland to fork and disseminate AMR and virulence. In this process, some clinically important antimicrobial-resistant pathogens, such as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), colistin-resistant or tigecycline-resistant bacteria have spread so quickly that they could be found emerging in clinical hospitals, agricultural farmlands, foods, food animals, environments and also humans/animals guts, in the meantime, super-bug foodborne pathogens with high-level AMR or hypervirulence has been disclosed emerging or re-emerging in more and more publications. Omics techniques including genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabonomics have greatly improved our understanding of the mechanisms of foodborne pathogens in terms of their AMR and pathogenesis. Simultaneously, an integrated multi-disciplinary “One Health” approach has been used for widespread and sustained surveillance of foodborne pathogens, based on a multi-sectoral collaboration framework, to mitigate and prevent the threats of pathogens of animal-, human-, environment- and food- origins. Though a large number of foodborne pathogen isolates were collected with unfolded phenotypic characteristics as the phase goals for surveillance work, it is still far from clearly exploring how many super-bugs there were, why they were so resistant or hypervirulent, where they came from, how they disseminated, how the mechanisms transmitted and evolved, and what the potential hazards were, etc. We need more intensive and compelling evidence, explanation, and interpretation. This Research Topic aims to provide a platform for recent discoveries and the latest progress in detection, mechanism, and dissemination from Omics insights with regards to the emerging or re-emerging foodborne pathogens with high-level AMR (Multi-drug resistant/Extensively-drug resistant/Pan-drug resistant, MDR/XDR/PDR) or hypervirulence, to increase the understanding of these superbugs, to track their sources, to discover the mechanisms that make them super, and to uncover the dissemination along the animal-food-human chain based on big data, and to assess the human health risks by uptaking them. Emergence, mechanism, and dissemination of them via the food chain by using the application of Omics-based technologies would be of particular interest for this topic. This Research Topic welcomes authors worldwide to contribute any article types like Original Research, Review & Mini-Review, Methods, Hypothesis and Theory, and Perspectives related to this topic, especially for some rare or unusual isolates with extreme importance and significance. Themes in the Research Topic include but are not limited to the sub-topics we suggested below: 1. Detection, prevalence, phenotypic characterizations, risk assessment, and regional or long-term surveillance of the “super-bug” foodborne pathogens; 2. Mechanisms (especially novel mechanisms) explanation/exploration or drug target development using Omics-based technologies and bioinformatics analysis; 3. Regionally or global dissemination of “super-bug” foodborne pathogen clones or relevant determinants especially mobile genetic elements (MGEs); 4. Current advances in the novel and instant detection method/models or method comparison report for the pathogenicity phenotype of the foodborne pathogens; 5. Any pathogen/disease prevention control and clinical treatment management developed to oppose the “super-bug” foodborne pathogen, like the gut microbiota approach, etc. Please note that Frontiers in Microbiology does not accept Case Reports, Clinical Trials, and Systematic Reviews, hence Frontiers in Public Health is a better option. Conflict of Interest: Dr. Scott Van Nguyen works for ATCC. All other topic editors declare no conflict of interest.

High-level antimicrobial resistance or hypervirulence in emerging and re-emerging “super-bug” foodborne pathogens: Detection, mechanism, and dissemination from omics insights

Guerrino Macori

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