Emergence of plasmid-borne bla oxa-181 gene in Ochrobactrum intermedium: first report from India

Thamaraiselvan Shanthini; Prasanth Manohar; Sagadevan Samna; Rajendran Srividya; Bulent Bozdogan; Manian Rameshpathy; Nachimuthu Ramesh

doi:10.1099/acmi.0.000024

Emergence of plasmid-borne bla _oxa-181 gene in Ochrobactrum intermedium: first report from India

Access Microbiol. 2019 May 15;1(3):e000024. doi: 10.1099/acmi.0.000024. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Thamaraiselvan Shanthini¹, Prasanth Manohar¹, Sagadevan Samna¹, Rajendran Srividya¹, Bulent Bozdogan², Manian Rameshpathy³, Nachimuthu Ramesh¹

Affiliations

¹ Antibiotic Resistance and Phage Therapy Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Sciences, School of Bioscience and Technology, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India.
² Department of Microbiology, Recombinant DNA and Protein Research Center (REDPROM), Adnan Menderes University, 09100 Aydın, Turkey.
³ Department of Biotechnology, School of Biosciences and Technology, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India.

Abstract

Wastewater has become a potential habitat for multi-drug-resistant bacteria. The present study aims to screen for the presence of carbapenem-resistant bacteria in sewage water samples collected from hospital and non-hospital sources. From a total of 19 sewage water samples collected, 100 carbapenem-resistant non-lactose-fermenting Gram-negative bacteria (CR-NF-GNB) were isolated using MacConkey agar cultured with 8 mg l^-1 of meropenem. On screening for beta-lactamase resistance genes (bla _NDM, bla _OXA-48-like, bla _IMP, bla _VIM and bla _KPC), one isolate, Ochrobactrum intermedium , was found to carry the plasmid-borne bla _OXA-48-like gene. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first report of the rare and emerging opportunistic pathogen Ochrobactrum intermedium encoding the OXA-181 gene in its plasmid.

Keywords: Gram-negative bacteria; OXA; Ochrobactrum intermedium; carbapenem-resistant; carbapenemase; multi-drug resistance.