Antibiotic resistance has emerged as an imminent pandemic. Rapid diagnostic assays distinguish bacterial infections from other diseases and aid antimicrobial stewardship, therapy optimization, and epidemiological surveillance. Traditional methods typically have longer turn-around times for definitive results. On the other hand, proteomic studies have progressed constantly and improved both in qualitative and quantitative analysis. With a wide range of data sets made available in the public domain, the ability to interpret the data has considerably reduced the error rates. This review gives an insight on state-of-the-art proteomic techniques in diagnosing antibiotic resistance in ESKAPE pathogens with a future outlook for evading the "imminent pandemic".
Keywords: ESKAPE; MALDI-TOF; antibiotic resistance; bacterial resistance; mass spectrometry; proteomics.