Precious develops computational methods to automatically identify potentially high-risk antibiotic resistance genes by analyzing whether they are unusual for a given bacterium and whether they have the potential to spread.
“Not all antibiotic resistance genes are equally alarming—I develop methods that help tell the difference.”
I ended my last post on a limit. A resistance gene can pick up so many changes over generations that direct comparison of its DNA letters to the catalogue of known resistance genes stops recognizing it, even though the protein it builds still works and still defeats the antibiotic. It is a gene we know. […]
A culture and sensitivity report, as I described in my last blog post, can come back as a column of Rs: resistant across all tested antibiotics. This tells us that a bacterium is resistant, but not why. It also does not name the gene responsible. To find those answers, researchers turn to the bacterium’s DNA. […]
You are sitting in a hospital triage area. The nurse looks up from her clipboard: “Have you ever been told you have MRSA or VRE?” She says it like it is routine. You have never heard those letters in your life. After my last post, a few readers asked questions that made me realize I […]
When two inpatients at a Canadian hospital both tested positive for a gene capable of defying carbapenems, one of medicine’s last-resort antibiotics, it looked like an outbreak. It wasn’t. The gene in question was VIM, a well-known resistance gene that infection control teams dread. Finding it once is concerning. Finding it twice, in the same facility, days apart, raises […]
