A novel method to discover fluoroquinolone antibiotic resistance (qnr) genes in fragmented nucleotide sequences.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Broad-spectrum fluoroquinolone antibiotics are central in modern health care and are used to treat and prevent a wide range of bacterial infections. The recently discovered qnr genes provide a mechanism of resistance with the potential to rapidly spread between bacteria using horizontal gene transfer. As for many antibiotic resistance genes present in pathogens today, qnr genes are hypothesized to originate from environmental bacteria. The vast amount of data generated by shotgun metagenomics can therefore be used to explore the diversity of qnr genes in more detail.

Results

In this paper we describe a new method to identify qnr genes in nucleotide sequence data. We show, using cross-validation, that the method has a high statistical power of correctly classifying

SUBMITTER: Boulund F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3543242 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature