Today is the European Antibiotic Awareness Day and we celebrate by officially launching the EMBARK program.

The primary goal of EMBARK is to establish a baseline for how common resistance is in the environment and what resistance types that can be expected where. That background data will then underpin efforts to standardize different methods for resistance surveillance and identify high-priority targets that should be used for efficient monitoring. In addition, EMBARK will develop and evaluate methods to detect new resistance factors and thereby provide an early-warning system for emerging resistance threats.

EMBARK is an international collaboration funded by JPIAMR. The consortium consists of coordinator Johan Bengtsson-Palme (University of Gothenburg, Sweden), Thomas Berendonk (TU-Dresden, Germany), Luis Pedro Coelho (Fudan University, China), Sofia Forslund (ECRC Max-Delbrück-Centrum für Molekulare Medizin, Germany), Etienne Ruppé (INSERM, France) and Rabaab Zahra (Quaid-i-Azam University, Pakistan).

Through this website, we will release protocols and data as they are generated from the project. Follow our progress towards better monitoring of antimicrobial resistance in the environment here and on Twitter @EMBARK_JPIAMR!