Klebsiella pneumoniae Raw sequence reads. Klebsiella pneumoniae

Antimicrobial resistance is a silent pandemic causing millions of deaths per year. K. pneumoniae is one of the leading causes of healthcare associated infections and its resistance and virulence is predominantly plasmid based. The association between genotypic and phenotypic resistance is one of the main challenges in antimicrobial resistance research performed by Whole Genome Sequencing. Moreover, the wide implementation of short reads sequencing presents several shortcomings in producing fully assembled plasmid sequences and in differentiate between plasmid and chromosomic content. The developed plasmid signature strategy avoids those steps and allows the correct association between the plasmid content and the phenotypic pattern of drug resistance. The obtained results suggest the possibility to adopt the proposed approach for mobilome-based epidemiological investigations.