Acinetobacter baumannii strain:UOL-KIMZ-24 Genome sequencing. Acinetobacter baumannii strain:UOL-KIMZ-24

Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii) is an opportunistic pathogen which usually attacks immunocompromised patients admitted in intensive care units. Multiple studies carried out during the past decade have reported this infectious agent to have acquired resistance to several antibiotics resulting in a high mortality rate. The defined genes for this study make the organism resistant to even the last resort antibiotics. Now scientists are getting inclined towards use of non-antibiotic antimicrobial for treatment of multi-drug resistant infections. In this regard Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats system (CRISPR/Cas system) has been rapidly adopted worldwide due to its application in targeted insertion of sequence, editing of base and in gene knockout. To validate the changes produced by CRISPR-Cas9 system in bacteria, Raman spectroscopy, a technique used for molecular characterization of a sample, will be employed. The present study is directed to highlight the current status of carbapenem resistance among A. baumannii strains and is intended to assess the role of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) in countering the situation. Raman spectra of CRISPR-Cas9 treated A. baumannii would be examined and compared with those of untreated spectra to detect molecular changes in bacteria after such treatment. The findings of the study will help in unravelling the potential of CRISPR gene editing system in overcoming antibiotic resistance in the strains under study.