Advances in antimicrobial resistance testing

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), especially bacterial AMR, poses a global threat to public health and has become a huge obstacle to the effective control of related infectious diseases. Following the golden age of antimicrobials discovery between the 1940s and 1960s, antimicrobial abuse resulted in the rapid emergence of AMR. Nowadays, the problem of AMR has become increasingly serious, and some bacteria have reached the brink of no suitable antimicrobials available. Rapid detection of AMR and level quantification are the prerequisites to control the spread of AMR. Although time-consuming, traditional phenotype-based methods are still the primary methods used in clinical laboratories and are regarded as the gold standard for AMR identification. To offset the limitation of the long turnaround time of phenotype-based methods, molecular detection methods such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), isothermal amplification, high-throughput sequencing, gene microarray, and mass spectrometry have begun to be widely used and served as important complements to phenotype-based methods. This chapter will describe the advances in the above technologies applied in AMR testing.