Genomic analysis of high-risk clones of Acinetobacter baumannii from different hospitals in Brazil

Abstract

The apocalyptical post-antimicrobial era has already dawned. Pan-resistant pathogens that require the use of combined therapy are already circulating in several hospitals around the world. As an attempt to reduce the spread of resistant bacteria, the United Nations proposed a combined plan to fight the antimicrobial resistance. One of the most worrisome resistant pathogen currently spread in hospitals is carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (CRAB). These pathogens has the ability to acquire several resistance mechanisms, and to persist in the hospital settings over time. In Brazil, a country with high endemics rates of CRAB, molecular epidemiology revealed the occurrence of four major clonal complexes, namely CC1, CC15, CC25 and CC79, known as "high-risk clones". The reasons to explain the success of these high-risk clones CRAB are not well elucidated so far, but genomic analysis can explain micro evolutionary aspects of their establishment in Brazil. By using large-scale and deep sequencing, the highest discriminatory level of identification of bacterial species can be achieved. The Next-Generation sequencing NGS (Illumina platforms) will be employed to characterize the resistome, mobilome and plasmidome of 96 Acinetobacter strains recovered from 30 different Brazilian institutions. Correlations between the antimicrobial susceptibility testing and the NGS results will be done, in order to provide an in silico approach to detect antimicrobial resistance. The MALDI-TOF technology will also be employed to find presumptive markers of the high-risk clones A. baumannii. (AU)