Modern medicine is impossible without antibiotics, but global antibiotic usage has led to the development of increasing numbers of multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria. Thus, we still have problems with infectious disease treatment despite an arsenal of antibiotics. This has forced researchers to develop new drugs that will be effective against resistant bacteria. Some of these prospective molecules are antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), which are an important component of the innate immune system of various organisms in nature. Currently, more than 3,000 AMPs have been reported with different activities against different bacterial species including resistant phenotype bacteria. AMPs display remarkable structural and functional diversity that is not completely understood. As such, this book presents a comprehensive overview of AMPs and their mechanism of action against MDR bacteria.

Many invertebrates are serious pests of agriculture (e.g., mites and locusts), vectors of disease (e.g., mosquitoes and aquatic snails) and venomous (e.g., scorpions), whilst others are beneficial to humans as pollinators, food sources, and detritivores. Despite their obvious ecological, medical, and economic importance, this is the first comprehensive review of invertebrate diseases to be available within a single volume. Concurrent molecular and bioinformatics developments over the last decade have catalysed a renaissance in invertebrate pathology. High-throughput sequencing, handheld diagnostic kits, and the move to new technologies have rapidly increased our understanding of invertebrate diseases, generating a large volume of fundamental and applied research on the topic. An overview is now timely and this authoritative work assembles an international team of the leading specialists in the field to review the main diseases and pathologic manifestations of all the major invertebrate groups. Each chapter adopts a common plan in terms of its scope and approach to achieve a succinct and coherent synthesis. Invertebrate Pathology is aimed at graduate students and researchers in the fields of disease ecology, invertebrate biology, comparative immunology, aquaculture, fisheries, veterinary science, evolution, and conservation. It will be particularly useful for readers new to the field as well as a broader interdisciplinary audience of practitioners and resource managers.

In 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) listed cancer as the second leading cause of death and highlighted antimicrobial resistance as “a key global health challenge” that may, in a worst case scenario, lead to an annual death toll of 10 million by 2050, which would exceed predicted cancer deaths by 20%. Novel promising therapeutic options to reduce morbidity and mortality of both infectious microbial diseases and cancer are being developed based on antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), i.e., evolutionary proven antibiotics that also possess anti-cancer activities. Intriguingly, AMPs and anti-cancer peptides (ACPs) rely typically on novel mechanisms and cellular targets not used by current antibiotics or chemotherapeutics. Initiated by presentations at the International Meeting of Antimicrobial Peptides in 2016 (IMAP 2016), hosted at Leipzig University, Germany, this book compiles the most recent strategies and promising lead compounds for treating multi- and pan-resistant microbes and chemo-resistant cancer cells in fourteen different chapters representing leading research groups from five different continents. In this respect, the book shall stimulate new avenues of thinking and strategies in tackling forthcoming antimicrobial and cancer resistance health threats with the hope that the scenarios recently reported by the WHO will never eventuate.