Medical News Observer

Scientists from the Federal Research and Clinical Center of Physical-Chemical Medicine, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and Data Laboratory have created the ResistoMap, an interactive visualization of gut resistome. Gut resistome is human gut microbiota potential to resist antibiotics and includes the set of all antibiotic resistance genes in the genomes of human gut microbes. Their ResistoMap will help identify national trends in antibiotic use and control antibiotic resistance on the global scale. This research is published in journal Bioinformatics.

Resistomap –  an interactive world map of human gut microbiota potential to resist antibiotics. Credit: Bioinformatics

Microbial drug resistance is caused by the extensive uncontrolled use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture. It has been predicted that by 2050 around 10 million people will die annually due to reasons associated with drug resistance.

The ResistoMap has two main interactive work fields: a geographic map and a heat map. A user can choose the antibiotic group or country of interest to be displayed on the heat map and obtain a resistome cross section. The data can be filtered by the country of origin, gender, age, and diagnosis. The current version of the interactive map developed by the authors draws on a dataset that includes over 1600 individuals from 12 studies covering 15 countries. However, the dataset can be expanded by additional input from users reflecting the findings of new published studies in a unified format.

Using the ResistoMap, researchers fee that it is possible to estimate the global variation of the resistance to different groups of antibiotics and explore the associations between specific drugs and clinical factors or other metadata. For example, the Danish gut metagenomes tend to demonstrate the lowest resistome among the European groups, whereas the French samples have the highest levels, particularly of the fluoroquinolones, a group of broad-spectrum anti-bacterial drugs. This is in agreement with the fact that France has the highest total antibiotic use across Western Europe, while the use of antimicrobial drugs in Denmark and Germany is moderate, both in health care and agriculture. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Chinese and Russian populations appear to have increased levels of resistome, which is likely due to looser regulation policies, frequent prescription of broad-spectrum antibiotics, and their over-the-counter availability without prescription. The lowest levels of microbiota resistome are observed in the native population of Venezuela who have no documented contacts with populations of the developed countries. ResistoMap-informed analysis reveals certain novel trends that await further interpretation from the clinical standpoint.

Konstantin Yarygin, one of the creators of the visualization tool, says, “We anticipate that the exploratory analysis of global gut resistome enabled by the ResistoMap will provide new insights into how the use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture could be optimized.”

Citation: Yarygin, Konstantin S., Boris A. Kovarsky, Tatyana S. Bibikova, Damir S. Melnikov, Alexander V. Tyakht, and Dmitry G. Alexeev. “ResistoMap—online visualization of human gut microbiota antibiotic resistome.” Bioinformatics, 2017.
doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btx134.
Research funding: Russian Scientific Foundation.
Adapted from press release by the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.