Genomics and metabolic modelling of the Klebsiella pneumoniae Species Complex, a drug resistant priority pathogen

Klebsiella pneumoniae are bacteria that cause serious infections in hospitals worldwide and are often resistant to antibiotics. Individual K. pneumoniae strains can have differing metabolism to each other, such as the ability to use certain nutrients, which could explain why some of these bacteria can thrive within hospitals. This research provided insight into how this metabolism differed across thousands of K. pneumoniae strains using a computational process called metabolic modelling. The results identified metabolic traits associated with multidrug resistant strains, and highlighted the role of mobile genetic elements, called plasmids, in driving these differences in metabolism.