Augmented surveillance of antimicrobial resistance with high-throughput robotics detects transnational flow of fluoroquinolone-resistant Escherichia coli strain into poultry.

Background: Food animal AMR surveillance programs assess only small numbers of Escherichia coli (from 100 to 600 per animal class) nationally each year, severely limiting the evaluation of public health risk(s). Here we demonstrate an affordable approach for early detection of emerging resistance on a broad scale that can also accurately characterize spatial and temporal changes in resistance.

Methods: Caecal samples (n = 295) obtained from 10 meat poultry were screened using high-throughput robotics.

Antimicrobial Resistance of and Genomic Insights into Pasteurella multocida Strains Isolated from Australian Pigs.

Infection with Pasteurella multocida represents a significant economic threat to Australian pig producers, yet our knowledge of its antimicrobial susceptibilities is lagging, and genomic characterization of P. multocida strains associated with porcine lower respiratory disease is internationally scarce. This study utilized high-throughput robotics to phenotypically and genetically characterize an industry-wide collection of 252 clinical P.

Robotic Antimicrobial Susceptibility Platform (RASP): a next-generation approach to One Health surveillance of antimicrobial resistance.

Background: Surveillance of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is critical to reducing its wide-reaching impact. Its reliance on sample size invites solutions to longstanding constraints regarding scalability. A robotic platform (RASP) was developed for high-throughput AMR surveillance in accordance with internationally recognized standards (CLSI and ISO 20776-1:2019) and validated through a series of experiments.

Primer ID ultra-deep sequencing reveals dynamics of drug resistance-associated variants in breakthrough hepatitis C viruses: relevance to treatment outcome and resistance screening.

Background: Use of direct-acting antiviral drugs (DAAs) that target HCV may be hampered by the rapid selection of viral strains that harbour drug resistance-associated variants (RAVs). These RAVs are often associated with a fitness cost and tend to occur on low-frequency strains within treatment-naive subjects. To address the clinical relevance of low frequency RAVs in the setting of DAAs, this study utilized a Primer ID ultra-deep sequencing approach to mitigate PCR errors and bias to accurately quantify viral sequences in subjects that failed DAA treatment.