Bacterial resistance genes found in Women and infants in Australia

 By: Andrea Martinez

This figure shows (A) the major and (B) the minor types of antimicrobial resistance genes that were found in the fecal samples of healthy women and infants in Australia. This is simply the overview that was found when the researchers used the shotgun metagenomics sequencing method. Figure from Guernier-Cambert et. al.

    
    Over the last couple of years, there has been a rise in the number of bacteria and other microorganisms that develop antimicrobial resistance. This has led to nearly 700,000 deaths a year due to these drug-resistant diseases. The human gut contains a large variety of bacteria which can differ due to one's age, diet, genetic background, culture, pregnancy, and a variety of other factors. Recently it was found that human gut resistomes can be diverse due to the country we live in. In this study, there were fecal samples collected from seven adults and two infants who are from southeast Australia since Australia was ranked seventh when it came to high rates of systematic antimicrobial use within the 26 European countries. The samples were collected from women that were pregnant at about their 36 week period. There were two types of sequencing methods used in this study, non-targeted sequencing: Shotgun Metagenomic Sequencing, and targeted sequencing: IonAmpliSeq Panels. With these methods, it was found that a total of 64 antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) are seen to be identified with the phenotypic resistance to 12 types of antibiotics. Overall the number of ARGs that were found in infants at the mean base depth per 5 million reads (BD5M) was a total mean of 13.7, this figure is significantly lower than that of what was found in adults which is a mean total of 24.4. This study is important to the general public because it provides information about how antimicrobials can become ineffective and why it is important to ensure that we always have treatments that are effective towards bacterial infections.

Reference:

Guernier-Cambert, V., Chamings, A., Collier, F., & Alexandersen, S. (1AD, January 1). Diverse bacterial resistance GENES detected in fecal samples From Clinically healthy women and infants IN Australia-A DESCRIPTIVE pilot study. Frontiers. Retrieved from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2021.596984/full.