Identification of acquired antimicrobial resistance genes

Identification of antimicrobial resistance genes is important for understanding the underlying mechanisms and the epidemiology of antimicrobial resistance. As the costs of whole-genome sequencing (WGS) continue to decline, it becomes increasingly available in routine diagnostic laboratories and is anticipated to substitute traditional methods for resistance gene identification. Thus, the current challenge is to extract the relevant information from the large amount of generated data.

We developed a web-based method, ResFinder that uses BLAST for identification of acquired antimicrobial resistance genes in whole-genome data. As input, the method can use both pre-assembled, complete or partial genomes, and short sequence reads from four different sequencing platforms. The method was evaluated on 1862 GenBank files containing 1411 different resistance genes, as well as on 23 de-novo-sequenced isolates.