A machine learning framework to predict antibiotic resistance traits and yet unknown genes underlying resistance to specific antibiotics in bacterial strains

Recently, the frequency of observing bacterial strains without known genetic components underlying phenotypic resistance to antibiotics has increased. There are several strains of bacteria lacking known resistance genes; however, they demonstrate resistance phenotype to drugs of that family. Although such strains are fewer compared to the overall population, they pose grave emerging threats to an already heavily challenged area of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), where death tolls have reached similar to 700 000 per year and a grim projection of similar to 10 million deaths per year by 2050 looms. Considering the fact that development of novel antibiotics is not keeping pace with the emergence and dissemination of resistance, there is a pressing need to decipher yet unknown genetic mechanisms of resistance, which will enable developing strategies for the best use of available interventions and show the way for the development of new drugs. In this study, we present a machine learning framework to predict novel AMR factors that are potentially responsible for resistance to specific antimicrobial drugs. The machine learning framework utilizes whole-genome sequencing AMR genetic data and antimicrobial susceptibility testing phenotypic data to predict resistance phenotypes and rank AMR genes by their importance in discriminating the resistance from the susceptible phenotypes. In summary, we present here a bioinformatics framework for training machine learning models, evaluating their performances, selecting the best performing model(s) and finally predicting the most important AMR loci for the resistance involved.

Automated summary

This study presents a machine learning framework to predict novel antimicrobial resistance (AMR) factors responsible for resistance to specific drugs, aiming to unravel unknown genetic mechanisms of resistance, optimize the use of available interventions, and guide the development of new drugs.