According to the World Health Organization (WHO), antibiotic or antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development.¹ Mobile genetic elements (MGEs) provide mechanisms for horizontal gene transfer of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) from a wide variety of environmental reservoirs. A thorough understanding of the diversity, abundance and distribution of ARGs is essential to design effective surveillance, prevention and control strategies. This is currently hampered by our ability to identify the hosts of ARGs, and the MGEs (plasmids, transposons and integrons) that mediate their spread.

Our ProxiMeta^™ Metagenome Deconvolution Platform provides a powerful tool for studying AMR. The proximity ligation library prep captures fragments of DNA that are co-located in cells in vivo. Computational integration with shotgun metagenomic enables accurate, strain-level assignment of MGEs and ARGs with their hosts.

Read how the ProxiMeta Platform was used to:

• gain new insights into the host range of IncQ plasmids and class 1 integrons, by linking the resistome and plasmidome to the microbiome in a wastewater sample
• enable the identification of 188 novel virus-host associations and 94 antimicrobial resistance genes in a cow rumen sample