New light shed on spread of resistance to carbapenems in Escherichia coli

Enterobacteriaceae, including Escherichia coli, become resistant to carbapenems – a class of antibiotics that are usually effective against the most resistant infections. To determine whether this form of resistance is likely to spread easily among the population, scientists from the Institut Pasteur, Paris Public Hospital Network (AP-HP), Paris Saclay University and the CNRS, together with the French National Reference Center for Antibiotic Resistance laboratory at Bicêtre Hospital (AP-HP), decided to decipher the various scenarios for carbapenemase gene acquisition in E. coli. They showed that acquisition of these resistance genes generally requires many preliminary steps, particularly specific mutations, which may constrain their emergence and spread. Their research was published in Genome Medicine.

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