The course Antimicrobial resistance - theory and methods covers the topics related to antimicrobial resistance with basic definitions and overview on antimicrobials, their use and the emergence and spread of resistance. The course will guide you through the concepts and the importance of resistance spread and dissemination and how that happens. It will show you how bacteria become resistant and which mechanisms they might use for this. And as part of the course, you will also receive some training in methods for antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) and detection of specific resistance in the microbiological laboratories with the basic methods available and with focus on obtaining good quality results that can be interpreted and used for different purposes.
Additionally, it will show you how to use genomic analysis tools to analyze whole genome sequencing data to detect resistance genes (and or other genes of interest) in a simple and easy way using online tools freely available.
This course is for you if you are interested in getting to know more about antimicrobials and antimicrobial resistance in bacteria. We aim at having a broad scope and international reach in different sectors. So this course us for you whether you are an undergraduate or graduate student, a researcher, medical or veterinary related professional, technical staff or simply interested in the subject!
Course modules:
Antimicrobial and antimicrobial action
Here you will learn about antibiotics/ antimicrobials and you will know more about: what they are, where do they come from, what are the major groups and how can we classify them, how do they have an effect, how do they act on the bacterial cells.
Antimicrobials and resistance
This module contains information about antimicrobials and the development of resistance in bacteria including causes for resistance and their mechanisms, as well as an insight in how resistance disseminates and how it can be selected.
Antimicrobial susceptibility testing
This module deals with antimicrobial susceptibility testing in the laboratory: its importance and use, descriptions of the methods and their applications and detailed descriptions of the procedures applied for the main methods.
Interpretation
This module gives practical insight on how to interpret antimicrobial susceptibility results.
Quality assurance
This module is dedicated to Quality management and Quality assurance (QA/ Quality control (QC) procedures and use of QC strains to assure the quality of results of antimicrobial susceptibility testing: importance, elements and principles.
Alternatives to AST- Genome analysis tools
As alternative to the phenotypical methods, the researcher might decide to use genotypically based methods to identify genes of interest. in the lectures of this module we present the Resfinder tool which may be used to find resistance mechanisms ( genes and in the future versions also specific point mutations)from Whole genome sequences of bacteria of interest. The second Lecture is a demonstration of the My DB Finder which can be used to identify genes of interest defined by the user from Whole genome sequence data.
Specific resistances