Acinetobacter baumannii: genomic profiling of an emerging hospital pathogen

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Acinetobacter baumannii is a bacterium that causes infections in critically ill patients in hospital. It has an alarming propensity to cause hospital outbreaks and a worrying ability to acquire resistance to multiple antibiotics. Acinetobacter infection has also emerged as a particular threat to returning casualties of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Serious gaps remain in our knowledge as to how this organism spreads, causes disease and resists antibiotics. In this proposal, we have assembled an inter-disciplinary team of researchers from the University of Birmingham, the National Health Service and the Health Protection Agency to exploit a new cutting-edge approach (high-throughput bacterial genome sequencing) to fill these gaps and advance our understanding of multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii.