Finding drug-resistant genes in bacteria remains a challenge. However, scientists at Washington State University have developed a software that can detect these genes.
"We need to develop tools to easily and efficiently predict antimicrobial resistance that increasingly threatens health and livelihoods around the world," says Abu Sayed Chowdhury, graduate student and lead author of the study.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), or often known as antibiotic resistance, remains a global threat leading to an increased rate of infections, mortality, and health-care costs.
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"Our software can be employed to analyze metagenomic data in greater depth than would be achieved by simple sequence matching algorithms," Chowdhury said. "This can be an important tool to identify novel antimicrobial resistance genes that eventually could become clinically important."
"The virtue of this program is that we can actually detect AMR in newly sequenced genomes," Broschat said. "It's a way of identifying AMR genes and their prevalence that might not otherwise have been found. That's really important."
In the study, researchers were eager to identify resistant genes found in common pathogens such as Clostridium, Enterococcus, Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, and Listeria. These bacterial species are often the cause of many foodborne sickness and other illnesses.
Source: Science Daily