Hospital metagenome sewage study

A better understanding of environmental transmission of antibiotic resistance genes (ARG) is required, to control the spread of MDR bacteria in hospitals. Thus our pilot study is aiming to characterize ARG transmission within a tertiary-care hospital and to evaluate the utility of wastewater as an indicator of ARG landscape within the hospital. Carbapenemase-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae were isolated from six patients, ten sinks and two wastewater samples. For ARG environmental reservoir assessment samples from ten sinks in two ICUs and a 24-hour composite wastewater sample was taken from the hospital building's outlet. Bacterial whole genome and metagenomic sequencing was used to evaluate the transmission of ARG from patients through sinks to hospital wastewater. Sequence assemblies were analyzed using Resistance Gene Identifier (RGI) combined with the Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database (CARD), to identify known ARG, and a DeepARG (ML) model to compare its performance against the curated database.