Application of aptamer technology in enterobacteria and non-fermenters: literature review.

Antimicrobial resistance has grown exponentially in the last decade and become a global health threat. The antibiotic resistance crisis has guided the scientific community to explore non-conventional interventions to target resistant bacteria. Development of new technologies, such as aptamers-based treatment and diagnosis, has shown to be promising with remarkable advantages over the past five years. This narrative review aims on what is already known regarding application of aptamer technology in enterobacteria and non-fermenters, and the prospects for future achievements. A systematic search of the English literature was performed on the 7th of December 2021 to identify papers on aptamer discovery, with a focus on gram negative isolates, published from January 01, 1993, to December 07, 2021, under the topics: (aptamer OR aptamers OR SELEX) AND (bacteria OR sepsis OR non-fermenter OR Enterobacteriaceae OR infection)). The reference lists of included articles were also searched, in addition to hand-searching of various relevant high-impact journals. Out of 2,474 articles, 30 experimental studies were recruited for review, and are chronologically described. Although the number of publications regarding development of aptamers to target these pathogenic agents has increased over the years, the recent publications are mostly around diagnostic devices manufactured using previously described aptamers. There have been less than one-third of the studies describing new and specific aptamers. From the 30 selected papers, 18 are regarding non-fermenters, seven approaching multi-species of bacteria and only five regarding a single enterobacteria. Even for the newly described aptamers, most of the published papers pertain to diagnostic aptamers and only seven focus on aptamers for therapeutics. The number of aptamers with strong and specific binding capacity are still limited. Improving the current SELEX and developing more APT remains the major hurdle for aptamer related studies.