Abstract
Acinetobacter baumannii is an important nosocomial bacterial pathogen. Multidrug-resistant isolates of A. baumannii are reported worldwide. Some A. baumannii isolates display resistance to nearly all antibiotics, making treatment of infections very challenging. As the need for new and effective antibiotics against A. baumannii becomes increasingly urgent, there is a need to understand the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance and virulence in this organism. In this work, comparative genomics was used to understand the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance and virulence in AB030, an extremely drug-resistant and hypervirulent strain of A. baumannii that is a representative of a recently emerged lineage of A. baumannii International Clone V. In order to characterize AB030, we carried out a genomic and phenotypic comparison with LAC-4, a previously described hyper-resistant and hypervirulent isolate. AB030 contains a number of antibiotic resistance- and virulence-associated genes that are not present in LAC-4. A number of these genes are present on mobile elements. This work shows the importance of characterizing the members of new lineages of A. baumannii in order to determine the development of antibiotic resistance and virulence in this organism.
Highlights
Acinetobacter baumannii infections are being reported with increasing frequency worldwide [1,2].A. baumannii’s success as an important hospital-acquired pathogen is attributed to its ability to acquire and accumulate genes associated with antibiotic resistance
AB030, isolated in Canada, shares a common ancestry with eight other isolates described from Mexico [9], indicating that sequence type 758 (ST758) is perhaps spreading in hospitals in the Americas
This study shows that genome plasticity and accumulation of resistance genes via insertion elements contribute to the extreme drug resistance phenotype of A. baumannii AB030, a member of the newly emerging lineage of A. baumannii
Summary
A. baumannii’s success as an important hospital-acquired pathogen is attributed to its ability to acquire and accumulate genes associated with antibiotic resistance. Multidrug-resistant isolates of A. baumannii are commonly reported from various clinical settings [3,4,5]. The WHO categorized carbapenem-resistant A. baumannii as the top priority pathogen against which treatment options are urgently needed [6]. Understanding the mechanisms of resistance as well as how antibiotic resistance genes spread in clinical isolates of A. baumannii is critical for finding new and effective treatment options for antibiotic-resistant A. baumannii isolates. With recent advances in next-generation sequencing, comparative genomics has emerged as a powerful tool for understanding the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance and virulence in bacterial pathogens [7,8]
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