Tag: Antibacterials

Together with Joakim Larsson‘s lab, we now have an open two-year postdoc position in bioinformatics on antibiotic resistance and biocide resistance. The development of antibiotic resistance has been driven by use of antibiotics, but antibacterial biocides also have the potential to select for antibiotic resistance. However, knowledge of which genes that contribute to biocide resistance and could be associated with antibiotic resistance is sparse. To some extent, such genes are documented in the BacMet database which we have developed, but this collection of resistance genes is only scratching the surface of all biocide resistance that exists among bacteria in the environment.

We are now looking for a postdoctoral fellow to continue the important work on bioinformatic analysis of biocide and antibiotic resistance to answer the question whether increasing biocide resistance would be a threat to human health. The postdoc will be working with the development of the BacMet database to make it more targeted towards biocidal substances and products in addition to resistance genes. The tasks include bioinformatic sequence analysis, literature studies and database and web programming. The work will also include investigations of the prevalence of the identified resistance genes in genomes and metagenomes.

The recruited person will work closely with both my group and the group of Prof. Joakim Larsson, and will participate in the JPIAMR-funded BIOCIDE project. You can apply to the postdoc position at the University of Gothenburg application portal: https://web103.reachmee.com/ext/I005/1035/job?site=7&lang=UK&validator=9b89bead79bb7258ad55c8d75228e5b7&job_id=25122

The deadline is May 4, 2022. Come work with us on this exciting topic in the intersect between two great research environments (if I may say it myself!) We look forward to your application!

For a bit more than a year, I have been part of an EFSA panel on biological hazards on cross contamination with antibiotic substances in animal feed. This week the panel has launched an open consultation on sections of the draft scientific opinion, including the proposed methodology and the data gaps identified. Anyone who are interested can submit written comments before 18 November 2020, and the full information can be found at the EFSA website.

Myself, Joakim Larsson and Erik Kristiansson have written a review on the environmental factors that influence development and spread of antibiotic resistance, which was published today in FEMS Microbiology Reviews. The review (1) builds on thoughts developed in the latter parts of my PhD thesis (2), and seeks to provide a synthesis knowledge gained from different subfields towards the current understanding of evolutionary and ecological processes leading to clinical appearance of resistance genes, as well as the important environmental dispersal barriers preventing spread of resistant pathogens.

We postulate that emergence of novel resistance factors and mobilization of resistance genes are likely to occur continuously in the environment. However, the great majority of such genetic events are unlikely to lead to establishment of novel resistance factors in bacterial populations, unless there is a selection pressure for maintaining them or their fitness costs are negligible. To enable measures to prevent resistance development in the environment, it is therefore critical to investigate under what conditions and to what extent environmental selection for resistance takes place. Selection for resistance is likely less important for the dissemination of resistant bacteria, but will ultimately depend on how well the species or strain in question thrives in the external environment. Metacommunity theory (3,4) suggests that dispersal ability is central to this process, and therefore opportunistic pathogens with their main habitat in the environment may play an important role in the exchange of resistance factors between humans and the environment. Understanding the dispersal barriers hindering this exchange is not only key to evaluate risks, but also to prevent resistant pathogens, as well as novel resistance genes, from reaching humans.

Towards the end of the paper, we suggest certain environments that seem to be more important from a risk management perspective. We also discuss additional problems linked to the development of antibiotic resistance, such as increased evolvability of bacterial genomes (5) and which other types of genes that may be mobilized in the future, should the development continue (1,6). In this review, we also further develop thoughts on the relative risks of re-recruiting and spreading well-known resistance factors already circulating in pathogens, versus recruitment of completely novel resistance genes from environmental bacteria (7). While the latter case is likely to be very rare, and thus almost impossible to quantify the risks for, the consequences of such (potentially one-time) events can be dire.

I personally think that this is one of the best though-through pieces I have ever written, and since it is open access and (in my biased opinion) written in a fairly accessible way, I recommend everyone to read it. It builds on the ecological theories for resistance ecology developed by, among others, Fernando Baquero and José Martinez (8-13). Over the last year, it has been stressed several times at meetings (e.g. at the EDAR conferences in August) that there is a need to develop an ecological framework for antibiotic resistance genes. I think this paper could be one of the foundational pillars on such an endeavor and look forward to see how it will fit into the growing literature on the subject!

References

1. Bengtsson-Palme J, Kristiansson E, Larsson DGJ: Environmental factors influencing the development and spread of antibiotic resistance. FEMS Microbiology Reviews, accepted manuscript (2017). doi: 10.1093/femsre/fux053
2. Bengtsson-Palme J: Antibiotic resistance in the environment: a contribution from metagenomic studies. Doctoral thesis (medicine), Department of Infectious Diseases, Institute of Biomedicine, Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, 2016. [Link]
3. Bengtsson J: Applied (meta)community ecology: diversity and ecosystem services at the intersection of local and regional processes. In: Verhoef HA, Morin PJ (eds.). Community Ecology: Processes, Models, and Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 115–130 (2009).
4. Leibold M, Norberg J: Biodiversity in metacommunities: Plankton as complex adaptive systems? Limnology and Oceanography, 1278–1289 (2004).
5. Gillings MR, Stokes HW: Are humans increasing bacterial evolvability? Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 27, 346–352 (2012).
6. Gillings MR: Evolutionary consequences of antibiotic use for the resistome, mobilome and microbial pangenome. Frontiers in Microbiology, 4, 4 (2013).
7. Bengtsson-Palme J, Larsson DGJ: Antibiotic resistance genes in the environment: prioritizing risks. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 13, 369 (2015). doi: 10.1038/nrmicro3399-c1
8. Baquero F, Alvarez-Ortega C, Martinez JL: Ecology and evolution of antibiotic resistance. Environmental Microbiology Reports, 1, 469–476 (2009).
9. Baquero F, Tedim AP, Coque TM: Antibiotic resistance shaping multi-level population biology of bacteria. Frontiers in Microbiology, 4, 15 (2013).
10. Berendonk TU, Manaia CM, Merlin C et al.: Tackling antibiotic resistance: the environmental framework. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 13, 310–317 (2015).
11. Hiltunen T, Virta M, Laine A-L: Antibiotic resistance in the wild: an eco-evolutionary perspective. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 372 (2017) doi: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0039.
12. Martinez JL: Bottlenecks in the transferability of antibiotic resistance from natural ecosystems to human bacterial pathogens. Frontiers in Microbiology, 2, 265 (2011).
13. Salyers AA, Amábile-Cuevas CF: Why are antibiotic resistance genes so resistant to elimination? Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, 41, 2321–2325 (1997).

It seems like our paper on the recently launched database on resistance genes against antibacterial biocides and metals (BacMet) has gone online as an advance access paper in Nucleic Acids Research today. Chandan Pal – the first author of the paper, and one of my close colleagues as well as my roommate at work – has made a tremendous job taking the database from a list of genes and references, to a full-fledged browsable and searchable database with a really nice interface. I have contributed along the process, and wrote the lion’s share of the code for the BacMet-Scan tool that can be downloaded along with the database files.

BacMet is a curated source of bacterial resistance genes against antibacterial biocides and metals. All gene entries included have at least one experimentally confirmed resistance gene with references in scientific literature. However, we have also made a homology-based prediction of genes that are likely to share the same resistance function (the BacMet predicted dataset). We believe that the BacMet database will make it possible to better understand co- and cross-resistance of biocides and metals to antibiotics within bacterial genomes and in complex microbial communities from different environments.

The database can be easily accessed here: http://bacmet.biomedicine.gu.se, and use of the database in scientific work can cite the following paper, which recently appeared in Nucleic Acids Research:

Pal C, Bengtsson-Palme J, Rensing C, Kristiansson E, Larsson DGJ: BacMet: Antibacterial Biocide and Metal Resistance Genes Database. Nucleic Acids Research. Database issue, advance access. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkt1252 [Paper link]