In silico screening of antibiotic resistance genes in a genomics library of bacteriophages

• Autor(a) principal: Aguiar, Sara Catarina Leal
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/15516
• topic: Resistência a antibióticos; Bacteriófagos; Bioinformática; Transdução; Antibiotic resistance; Bacteriophages; Bioinformatics; Transduction

Antibiotic resistance (AR) is a worldwide concern that threatens the effective treatment of infectionsusing antibiotics (1-5). It is known that AR is often mobile between bacteria of different taxonomic and ecological groups by either transformation, conjugation or tranduction (6,7). Here is address the controversial dissemination of AR through the mechanism of transduction by determining the presence of antibiotic resistance genes in bacteriphages genomes through an in silico approach. As such this dissertation presentes the sreening of 4789 antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in all 2051 bacteriophages genomes of the order Caudovirales available online using an in silico method of choise, and further intends to discuss the chalanges in the choice as also discuss the pros and limitations of the method chosen. Results determinated the presence of 32 different antibiotic resistance gene famalies in 16 different phage hosts at a 99% confidence interval. Although the results showed strong diversity among the phage genomes where ARGs were found, the impact oh the spread of AR through the transduction mechanism remains unclear. In order to address these questions, further future work can be carried out, although the releance might be also questioned.