Current strategy for local- to global-level molecular epidemiological characterisation of global antimicrobial resistance surveillance system pathogens

Dhiviya Prabaa Muthuirulandi Sethuvel, Naveen Kumar Devanga Ragupathi, Yamuna Devi Bakthavatchalam, Saranya Vijayakumar, Rosemol Varghese, Chaitra Shankar, Jobin John Jacob, Karthick Vasudevan, Divyaa Elangovan, Veeraraghavan BalajiIndian Journal of Medical Microbiology 2019 37(2):147-162 The prime goal of molecular epidemiology is to identify the origin and evolution of pathogens, which can potentially influence the public health worldwide. Traditional methods provide limited information which is not sufficient for outbreak investigation and studying transmission dynamics. The recent advancement of next-generation sequencing had a major impact on molecular epidemiological studies. Currently, whole-genome sequencing (WGS) has become the gold standard typing method, especially for clinically significant pathogens. Here, we aimed to describe the application of appropriate molecular typing methods for global antimicrobial resistance surveillance system pathogens based on the level of discrimination and epidemiological settings. This shows that sequence-based methods such as multi-locus sequence typing (MLST) are widely used due to cost-effectiveness and database accessibility. However, WGS is the only method of choice for studying Escherichia coli and Shigella spp. WGS is shown to have higher discrimination than other methods in typing Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii and Salmonella spp. due to its changing accessory genome content. For Gram positives such as Stre...
Source: Indian Journal of Medical Microbiology - Category: Microbiology Authors: Source Type: research