Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO, USA.
Curr Opin Microbiol. 2012 Oct;15(5):577-82. doi: 10.1016/j.mib.2012.07.004. Epub 2012 Sep 3.
Application of metagenomic functional selections to study antibiotic resistance genes is revealing a highly diverse and complex network of genetic exchange between bacterial pathogens and environmental reservoirs, which likely contributes significantly to increasing resistance levels in pathogens. In some cases, clinically relevant resistance genes have been acquired from organisms where their native function is not antibiotic resistance, and which may not even confer a resistance phenotype in their native context. In this review, we attempt to distinguish the resistance phenotype from the resistome genotype, and we highlight examples of genes and their hosts where this distinction becomes important in order to understand the relevance of environmental niches that contribute most to clinical problems associated with antibiotic resistance.
宏基因组功能选择在研究抗生素耐药基因方面的应用揭示了细菌病原体和环境储库之间遗传交换的高度多样化和复杂网络，这可能极大地导致了病原体耐药水平的增加。在某些情况下，临床上相关的耐药基因是从其天然功能不是抗生素耐药的生物体中获得的，而在其天然环境中，这些基因甚至可能不赋予耐药表型。在这篇综述中，我们试图将耐药表型与抗性病原体基因型区分开来，并强调了一些基因及其宿主的例子，在这些例子中，这种区分对于理解与抗生素耐药相关的临床问题的主要环境生态位的相关性非常重要。
