Antibiotic resistance in agriculture: Perspectives on upcoming strategies to overcome upsurge in resistance

Highlights • Antibiotics are used extensively in agriculture, livestock and in animal husbandry.• In agriculture, these are used to increase crop productivity; in animal husbandry and livestock to treat sick animals and as growth promoters in animal feed at controlled concentrations.• Bacteria are able to modify their genes under stress conditions by different mechanisms, and the resistance genes are cycled among agricultural soils and other different ecosystems through nutrient cycling.• A number of significant molecular strategies have been proposed to reduce the occurrence of antibiotic resistance in bacterial genomes .