First ‘One-Health’ study on genome-wide comparison of
multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli from
Human-Animal-Aquaculture-Environment continuum: a collective effort from
six institutes of India
Abstract
Summary: Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are emerging threat to
the global public health. Estimates suggests >10 million
deaths by 2050 due to AMR alone. Six Indian institute collaborated along
with 4 UK universities to address the issue of antimicrobial resistance
(AMR) through One Health approach under NEOSTAR project jointly funded
by Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India and UK
Research and Innovation (UKRI), United Kingdom. To address a question
“Dose AMR in livestock contributes to AMR in people? A pilot study was
conducted which is a collaborative effort to collect archival microbial
isolates of Escherichia coli, Klebsiella spp.,
Staphylococcus aureus and coagulase negative S. aureus
(CoNS). The current study deals with E. coli isolates collected
from ICAR-NIVEDI, ICAR-CIFT, ICAR-IVRI, ICAR-RCNEH, IIT-Delhi and GMCH
and were subjected to QC analysis at ICAR-NIVEDI’s BSL2+ facility, these
isolates were further segregated into 5 components viz., Animal origin
(including aquaculture) (n=50) food of animal origin (n=30), Human
(community settings) (n=3), Hospital origin (n=15) and Environment
origin (n=14). A total of 112 E. coli isolates sequenced for
whole genome through Illumina’s HiSeq 2500 platform at Sangers
Institute, UK and paired end libraries were generated for all the 112
isolates were assembled and subjected to genome characterization and
gene mining through various bioinformatics tools revealed the frequency
of resistance, co-resistance, and resistant genes are high and similar
across Human-Animal-Aquaculture-Environment continuum in India. This
emphasizes the need to collaborate and mitigate antibiotic resistance
with a ‘One Health’ approach.