EMBARK coordinator Johan Bengtsson-Palme has been selected as the 2022 recipient of the Einhorn SIGHT award. The award, which is granted by the Swedish Institute for Global Health Transformation and the Einhorn Family Foundation, recognizes outstanding global health research work by young researchers in the context of low- and middle-income countries. Johan was selected motivated by “outstanding research and development of tools to limit the global challenge of infectious diseases and antibiotic resistance”. Largely, these results have come out of the work performed in the EMBARK program.
We unfortunately had to again reschedule the webinar with Joakim Larsson, this time to December 15 (same time).
The two remaining webinars this year will be:
Nov 9, 14:00 UTC+2 Iruka Okeke – Genomic surveillance of human-invasive Salmonella in Nigeria Miranda Wallace – Understanding and predicting resistance in Bacteroides fragilis group bacteria using clinical and modern genomics tools [Register here]
We have two more EMBARK Webinars to go before the end of the year. For the second one with Joakim Larsson we have updated the date to December 14. Make a note in your calendars!
Nov 9, 14:00 UTC+2 Iruka Okeke – Genomic surveillance of human-invasive Salmonella in Nigeria Miranda Wallace – Understanding and predicting resistance in Bacteroides fragilis group bacteria using clinical and modern genomics tools [Register here]
If you live in the Northern Hemisphere every day is becoming darker and colder when we are steadily approaching winter. It is therefore extra important to illuminate your mind with interesting research and get that warm feeling in your body when reading a well written and structured paper. This is hopefully the feeling you will get when reading our October AMR digest. It touches the topics of evolution, the release of new databases, biofilms, wastewater and so much more. If you are from the Southern Hemisphere, you are of course equally welcome to take part of this interesting collection of papers!
*ResFinderFG v2.0: a database of antibiotic resistance genes obtained by functional metagenomics – Rémi Gschwind – bioRxiv A bioinformatic analysis is not better than the database and tools you base it on. Here Rémi Gschwind et al. describes a new and updated version of ResFinderFG, version 2.0. According to the authors most genes in antibiotic resistance gene databases mostly originate from culturable and pathogenic bacteria. ResfinderFG 2.0 is instead a database based on a literature search on studies identifying resistance genes using functional metagenomics. This means that there is a reduced bias in the ResFinderFG v.2.0 database towards culturable pathogens.
*ResFinderFG version 2.0 is out*https://t.co/l88RXjxPr6 If you do antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) annotation you should use it, and here is why : (1/4)
*A curated data resource of 214K metagenomes for characterization of the global antimicrobial resistome – Hannah-Marie Martiny – PLOS BIOLOGY Large scale metagenomic screenings of the worlds entire catalogue of metagenomic data could potentially reveal interesting global and local patterns of antibiotic resistance. Undertaking such a task is however way to computer intensive for most research groups to undertake. Luckily, Hannah-Marie Martiny et al. have already undertaken this task. In this paper they present a publicly available resource of antibiotic resistance gene abundance based on 442 Tbp of sequencing reads from 214,095 metagenomic samples from the European Nucleotide Archive.
Fig 4. Composition of reads assigned to ARGs from different resistance classes grouped by sampling origin.
Evolution *The evolution of spectrum in antibiotics and bacteriocins – Jacob D Palmer and Kevin R Foster – PNAS An important weapon in microbial competition is the production of antibiotics. But when is it preferential for a microbial population to produce wide or narrow spectrum antibiotics? In this paper Jacob D Palmer and Kevin R Foster have used an evolutionary model approach in an attempt to shed light on this question.
Time again for a new round of EMBARK Webinars. This fall we will have four fantastic main speakers, together with a group of excellent junior speakers. Sign up for the webinars today!
Sep 14, 14:00 UTC+2 Jon Hobman – Antimicrobial resistance in a UK dairy farm Kenyum Bagra – Invasion dynamics of AMR bacteria into microbiomes under stress [Register here]
Oct 5, 14:00 UTC+2 Stineke van Houte – Towards the development of CRISPR-Cas based tools to remove AMR from microbial communities Ruben Vazquez-Uribe – CRISPR-Cas antimicrobials: Resistance mechanisms [Register here]
Nov 9, 14:00 UTC+2 Iruka Okeke – Genomic surveillance of human-invasive Salmonella in Nigeria Miranda Wallace – Understanding and predicting resistance in Bacteroides fragilis group bacteria using clinical and modern genomics tools [Register here]
