Structure, Formation and Evolution of Multiple Antibiotic and Mercury Resistance Regions in Gram-negative Bacteria

抗生素耐药性，特别是同时对几种不同抗生素的耐药性，在引起人类和动物传染病的细菌中变得惊人地普遍。事实证明，新的抗生素出现缓慢，提高现有抗生素有效性和使用寿命的最明显方法是试图减少耐药细菌的流行。这只能通过良好的监测来实现，这种监测可以确定耐药细菌和耐药基因大量存在的地方，例如在食品生产动物中，医院中，人类肠道或环境中。国际上可获得的这类数据很少，澳大利亚的情况就更少了。利用最新的耐药基因知识和现代分子技术，这项工作将确定哪些耐药基因和耐药基因的组合赋予抗生素的耐药性，无论是在临床上使用或管理的食品生产动物或两者都被发现在澳大利亚的分离株。通过检查来自这两个和其他来源的多重抗生素耐药分离株，将准确跟踪这两个水库之间的耐药基因和耐药细菌的流动。这将有助于确定与医院环境中获得的难以治疗或无法治疗的感染相关的来源，并采取适当的行动。

Antibiotic resistance and particularly resistance to several different antibiotics simultaneously is becoming alarmingly common in bacteria that cause infectious diseases in humans and animals. New antibiotics are proving slow to appear and the most obvious way to increase the effectiveness and the useful lifetime of existing antibiotics is though attempting to reduce the prevalence of resistant bacteria. This can only be done using good surveillance that allows the places where resistant bacteria and resistance genes are present in large numbers, e.g. in food-production animals, in hospitals, in the human gut or in the environment, to be identified. Very little data of this type is available internationally and even less for the Australian situation. Using recent knowledge of resistance genes and modern molecular techniques the work will identify which resistance genes and combinations of resistance genes confering resistance to antibbiotics used either in the clinic or administered to food-producing animals or both are found in Australian isolates. By examining multiply antibiotic resistant isolates from these two and other sources the flow of resistance genes and resistant bacteria between these two reservoirs will be tracked accurately. This will allow the sources relevant to difficult to treat or untreatable infections acquired in the hospital setting to be identified and appropriate action taken.