Comparative Genomics of Multidrug Resistance in Acinetobacter baumannii

By P. Fournier, D. Vallenet, V. Barbe, S. Audic, Hiroyuki Ogata, L. Poirel, H. Richet, C. Robert, S. Mangenot, Chantal Abergel and 4 more. PLoS Genetics, 2006

825 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Acinetobacter baumannii is a species of nonfermentative gram-negative bacteria commonly found in water and soil. This organism was susceptible to most antibiotics in the 1970s. It has now become a major cause of hospital-acquired infections worldwide due to its remarkable propensity to rapidly acquire resistance determinants to a wide range of antibacterial agents. Here we use a comparative genomic approach to identify the complete repertoire of resistance genes exhibited by the multidrug-resistant A. baumannii strain AYE, which is epidemic in France, as well as to investigate the mechanisms of their acquisition by comparison with the fully susceptible A. baumannii strain SDF, which is associated with human body lice. The assembly of the whole shotgun genome sequences of the strains AYE and SDF gave an estimated size of 3.9 and 3.2 Mb, respectively. A. baumannii strain AYE exhibits an 86-kb genomic region termed a resistance island—the largest identified to date—in which 45 resistance genes are clustered. At the homologous location, the SDF strain exhibits a 20 kb-genomic island flanked by transposases but devoid of resistance markers. Such a switching genomic structure might be a hotspot that could explain the rapid acquisition of resistance markers under antimicrobial pressure. Sequence similarity and phylogenetic analyses confirm that most of the resistance genes found in the A. baumannii strain AYE have been recently acquired from bacteria of the genera Pseudomonas, Salmonella, or Escherichia. This study also resulted in the discovery of 19 new putative resistance genes. Whole-genome sequencing appears to be a fast and efficient approach to the exhaustive identification of resistance genes in epidemic infectious agents of clinical significance.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology, Molecular Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c47f9ab9cffb0fc885dc584e432bf809fb8cf6f0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

In Molecular Biology

In Molecular Medicine

Citations in the corpus

An increasing threat in hospitals: multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (2007, background): “baumannii has been described as a soil organism, but without the support of appropriate reference”
Acinetobacter baumannii: Emergence of a Successful Pathogen (2008, background): “5%) were localized to the AbaR1 resistance island (172).”
Carbapenem resistance in Acinetobacter baumannii: mechanisms and epidemiology. (2006, background): “The recent identification of the largest antibiotic resistance island known so far (more than 40 resistance genes) [71] in a carbapenem-susceptible and ESBL-producing A.”
Acinetobacter baumannii (2012, neutral): “baumannii is thought to have been sensitive to most antibiotics, today the pathogen appears to exhibit extensive resistance to most first-line antibiotics.(8) More recently, A.”
The Population Structure of Acinetobacter baumannii: Expanding Multiresistant Clones from an Ancestral Susceptible Genetic Pool (2010, background): “The three strains AB0057 [38], AB3070294 [38] and AYE [39,40] fell into ST1, consistent with their genome sequences showing .99.9% similarity at orthologous genes [38].”
Efflux-Mediated Drug Resistance in Bacteria: an Update (2009, background): “baumannii,([16]) is likely to be responsible only for intrinsic resistance.”
Acinetobacter baumannii: epidemiology, antimicrobial resistance, and treatment options. (2008, background): “A recent comparative genomic study of an epidemic, multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter strain in France found a large genomic “resistance island” containing 45 resistance genes that appeared to have been acquired from Pseudomonas, Salmonella, or Escherichia genera [76].”
The epidemiology and control of Acinetobacter baumannii in health care facilities. (2006, background): “In another study performed in a medical intensive care unit in France, molecular typing showed that, during an “outbreak,” epidemic cases coexisted with sporadic cases, and the epidemiologic investigation revealed that risk factors for epidemic cases included having undergone a surgical procedure in”
Gene flow, mobile genetic elements and the recruitment of antibiotic resistance genes into Gram-negative pathogens. (2011, background): “The expansion of these islands, with ongoing selection, is a major clinical problem in Acinetobacter baumannii, where they can extend over several tens of kilobases and comprise dozens of resistance genes (Fournier et al., 2006; Adams et al., 2008).”
Biology of Acinetobacter baumannii: Pathogenesis, Antibiotic Resistance Mechanisms, and Prospective Treatment Options (2017, background): “CmlA and CraA are major facilitator superfamily efflux pumps related with chloramphenicol (Fournier et al., 2006; Roca et al., 2009), and TetA is associated with tetracycline resistance (Ribera et al., 2003a).”
Antibiotic Pollution in the Environment: From Microbial Ecology to Public Policy (2019, background): “There are a range of resistance gene transfer mechanisms, discussed in detail elsewhere, including conjugative plasmids [44,45], uptake of naked DNA from the environment (transformation) [46,47], and phage-supported transmission (transduction) [48,49].”
Diverse and abundant antibiotic resistance genes in Chinese swine farms (2013, background): “In 30 y, it evolved from being completely antibiotic-susceptible to being multidrug-resistant by expanding a genomic island by 66 kb, including 45 resistance genes, which were horizontally transferred from various genera of bacteria, some of which likely originated from the environment (10).”
Acinetobacter, Chryseobacterium, Moraxella, and other Nonfermentative Gram-Negative Rods (2010, background): “Large clusters of horizontally transferred genes, conferring resistance to multiple antibiotics and interspersed with mobile genetic elements (resistance islands), were found to be integrated at a specific genomic site in a number of strains (87, 95).”