Harvesting and amplifying gene cassettes confers cross-resistance to critically important antibiotics
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Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Amikacin and piperacillin/tazobactam are frequent antibiotic choices to treat bloodstream infection, which is commonly fatal and most often caused by bacteria from the family Enterobacterales. Here we show that two gene cassettes located side-by-side in and ancestral integron similar to In37 have been “harvested” by insertion sequence IS26 as a transposon that is widely disseminated among the Enterobacterales. This transposon encodes the enzymes AAC(6’)-Ib-cr and OXA-1, reported, respectively, as amikacin and piperacillin/tazobactam resistance mechanisms. However, by studying bloodstream infection isolates from 769 patients from three hospitals serving a population of 1.2 million people in South West England, we show that increased enzyme production due to mutation in an IS26/In37-derived hybrid promoter or, more commonly, increased transposon copy number is required to simultaneously remove these two key therapeutic options; in many cases leaving only the last-resort antibiotic, meropenem. These findings may help improve the accuracy of predicting piperacillin/tazobactam treatment failure, allowing stratification of patients to receive meropenem or piperacillin/tazobactam, which may improve outcome and slow the emergence of meropenem resistance.
Editor(s)
Shafer, William M
Date Issued
2024-06
Date Acceptance
2024-04-30
Citation
PLoS Pathogens, 2024, 20 (6)
ISSN
1553-7366
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Journal / Book Title
PLoS Pathogens
Volume
20
Issue
6
Copyright Statement
Copyright: © 2024 Dulyayangkul et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
License URL
Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1012235
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
e1012235
Date Publish Online
2024-06-06