Case report: Detection of aadB and tet (39) on the plasmid of Acinetobacter baumannii TN81 in Vietnam through next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics analysis

Abstract

Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii) is currently ranked as the frst concern for the development of new antibiotics due to its capacity of resistance to all available families of antibiotics. The most common mechanism of antibiotic resistance development in A. baumannii is through the acquisition of mobile genetic elements such as plasmid, transposon and integrons carrying resistance genes. A. baumannii strain TN81 was isolated from sputum specimen of a 45-year-old man at Thanh Nhan Hospital (Hanoi, Vietnam) and confrmed to be a multidrug resistance strain with high minimum inhibitory concentration value of 8/9 type of antibiotics, especially colistin. De novo assembly of the whole genome shotgun sequence of strain TN81 yielded an estimated genome size of 3,739,193 bp with 593 contigs and N50 is 9,126 bp. MLST analysis showed that TN81 belongs to ST164, which was frst reported as genome assembly in Vietnam. Resistance genes identifcation through database found that TN81 contained 12 genes encoding for antibiotic resistance. Notably, we performed de novo assembly of plasmid through short read sequence and identifed two potential plasmid-encoded antibiotic resistance genes (ant(2’’)-Ia / aadB and tet (39), which were reported for the first time as in ST164 group. This study aimed to investigate the plasmid-containing antibiotic resistance genes from a nosocomial isolate of Acinetobacter baumannii. Conclusively, all of these results would be crucial information on antibiotic resistance in A. baumannii in Vietnam.