RNA markers for antibiotic susceptibility in Klebsiella pneumoniae

The prevalence of bacterial resistance to antibiotics poses a critical treat to human health that avoid the successful treatment of infections. Additionally, conventional culture-based approach of antimicrobial susceptibility tests requires a long turnaround time. Consequently, delay in appropriate diagnosis and treatment is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Therefore, emergence of a rapid and culture-independent technique to provide accurate and reliable antimicrobial susceptibility information is currently of paramount importance in the clinical management of infectious diseases.Recently, RNA-sequencing has been identified as a powerful diagnostic tool to explore the transcriptional gene expression and improve antimicrobial susceptibility tests. In this study, we successfully used RNA-sequencing to identify RNA signatures for ciprofloxacin-exposed Klebsiella pneumoniae. Further validation on more clinical isolates of K. pneumoniae approved the ability of selected markers to be applied as a novel and reliable molecular antimicrobial susceptibility test in clinical microbiological practices. This approach is potentially applicable in other models including other pathogens exposed to different class of antibiotics.