Acquired Antimicrobial Resistance Genes

Antimicrobial agents for treatment of infectious diseases is a wonderful achievements in the 20th century. However, soon after their introduction, acquired resistance emerged and this new condition had to be followed with the introduction of  new antimicrobial agents.
A large number of different genes in different loci should be responsible for antimicrobial resistance. Identification of these genes is important to understand resistance epidemiology, for verification of nonsusceptible phenotypes and for identification of resistant strains, and then advanced to guide the usage in clinics.
Normally, the detection of resistance genes has been performed by PCR or microarrays. However, in several cases, it is necessary to perform supplementary sequencing of the amplified PCR products. As a result, it is expensive andtime-consuming to performacomplete identification of resistance genes present in a strain collection.
The cost of DNA sequencing has been reduced, almost 10-fold reduction in every five years. As a consequence, DNA sequencing is becoming increasingly affordable for routine use and was recently utilized for complete characterization of antimicrobial resistance and virulence gene content during the safety evaluation of 28 strains intended for use in human nutrition. The challenge is, however, to extract the relevant
information from the large amount of data that is generated by these techniques.
ResFinder is a web server which providing a convenient way of identifying acquired antimicrobial resistance genes in completely sequenced isolates, it can be accessed at www.genomicepidemiology.org. Continuously updation give us new information as new resistance genes are identified.