Antimicrobial Resistance and Current Methods for its Detection

Abstract

Infection diagnosis and antibiotic sensitivity testing are important aspects of clinical microbiology that are in dire need of improvement owing to the inadequate current standards in the early detection of bacterial response to antibiotics. The increasing antimicrobial resistance is a serious global threat to human health. Current resistance-detecting methods, using the phenotypic antibiotic sensitivity test, which measures bacterial growth as affected by antibiotics, have long analysis times. Therefore, new and rapid methods are needed to detect antibiotic resistance. Here, we review the methods used to detect antibiotic resistance in bacteria, including that caused by biofilm development, and we look at the development of rapid methods for evaluating antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

Environmentally Relevant Antibiotic Concentrations Exert Stronger Selection Pressure on River Biofilm Resistomes than AMR-Reservoir Effluents

“…Efflux pumps and integron virulence mechanisms accounted for the greatest number of connections (nodes = 6), a pattern that is also consistent with our metagenomic findings. Efflux pumps are found in almost every bacterial core genome and function in the secretion of substances from the cell, and not solely the removal of antibiotic compounds or other damaging cytoplasmic compounds (e.g., hydrogen ions) [ 76 ]. The increased abundance of efflux pump genes in antibiotic-treated samples and close association with integrons further suggests that an increased occurrence of HGT events (i.e., mutations, recombination) within riverine biofilm has been noted [ 77 , 78 ].…”

“…Ultimately, this is a major challenge for biofilm-AMR research, given the unstandardized parameters for determining antibiotic susceptibility in multispecies bacterial consortia. Classic antibiotic susceptibility tests such as MIC determined using ECUAST or CLSI were primarily designed for planktonic clinical bacterial isolates, which may not correspond to the necessary concentrations to eradicate their biofilm counterparts, much less for polymicrobial biofilms [76,79]. The results from our NARMS culture-based examination provide a community-level approach for comparing the putative resistances from ARG and MGE occurrences observed from metagenomic data.…”