Recent advances in biochemical and molecular diagnostics for the rapid detection of antibiotic-resistant Enterobacteriaceae: a focus on ß-lactam resistance

ABSTRACT

Introduction: The rapid detection of resistance is a challenge for clinical microbiologists who wish to prevent deleterious individual and collective consequences such as (i) delaying efficient antibiotic therapy, which worsens the survival rate of the most severely ill patients, or (ii) delaying the isolation of the carriers of multidrug-resistant bacteria and promoting outbreaks; this last consequence is of special concern, and there are an increasing number of approaches and market-based solutions in response.

Areas covered: From simple, cheap biochemical tests to whole-genome sequencing, clinical microbiologists must select the most adequate phenotypic and genotypic tools to promptly detect and confirm β-lactam resistance from cultivated bacteria or from clinical specimens. Here, the authors review the published literature from the last 5 years about the primary technical approaches and commercial laboratory reagents for these purposes, including molecular, biochemical and immune assays. Furthermore, the authors discuss their intrinsic and relative performance, and we challenge their putative clinical impact.

Expert commentary: Until the availability of fully automated wet and dry whole genome sequencing solutions, microbiologists should focus on inexpensive biochemical tests for cultured isolates or monomicrobial clinical specimen and on using the expensive molecular PCR-based strategies for the targeted screening of complex biological environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Antimicrobial resistance
• gene detection
• ß-lactamase
• ESBL
• MALDI-TOF
• whole genome sequencing
• real-time PCR
• microarray assay
• electrospray ionization mass spectrometry

Declaration of interest

P. Nordmann and L. Poirel are co-inventors of the Carba NP and ESBL NP tests for which and international patents have been filled on behalf of the INSERM (Paris, France). The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.