Cent Eur J Public Health 2014, 22(1):60-63 | DOI: 10.21101/cejph.a3884

Transferable Fluoroquinolone Resistance in Enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Isolated from Hemocultures

Naďa Kulková1,3, Marta Babálová2,3, Jaroslava Brňová1,3, Vladimír Krčméry1,3
1 Department of Laboratory Medicine, Faculty of Health Care and Social Work, Trnava University in Trnava, Trnava, Slovakia
2 Department of Chemotherapy, Faculty of Medicine, Slovak Medical University, Bratislava, Slovakia
3 Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology, St. Elisabeth University of Health and Social Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia

Background: The main mechanisms causing high-level resistance to fluoroquinolones (FQ) are encoded chromosomally; that includes mutations in genes coding DNA-gyrase, but overexpression of efflux pumps contributes to increased minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of FQ as well. However, genes responsible for FQ-resistance may be harboured in transferable/conjugative plasmids. For some time, there was an assumption that resistance to FQ cannot be transferable in conjugation due to their synthetic origin, until 1998, when plasmid-mediated resistance transmission in Klebsiella pneumoniae was proved. We aimed to detect the occurrence of transferable FQ-resistance among Gram- negative bacteria isolated from patients in Czech and Slovak hospitals.

Methods: In this study, we tested 236 clinical isolates of Gram-negative bacteria for transferable resistance. Among relevant isolates we performed PCR detection of transferable fluoroquinolone genes (qnr).

Results: We have observed transfer of determinants of cephalosporin-resistance, aminoglycoside resistance as well as FQ-resistance (in 10 cases; 4.24%) not only intra-species but inter-species too. The presence of qnr gene was detected in two isolates of forty tested (5%). We have also observed that determinants of cephalosporin-resistance and aminoglycoside-resistance were linked to those of FQ-resistance and were transferred en block in conjugation.

Conclusion: We have proved that resistance to fluoroquinolones can be transferred horizontally via conjugation among Gram-negative bacteria of different species and is associated with resistance to other antibiotics.

Keywords: fluoroquinolones, resistance, transferable-fluoroquinolone resistance, conjugation, Gram-negative bacteria

Received: February 28, 2013; Revised: February 20, 2014; Accepted: February 20, 2014; Published: March 1, 2014  Show citation

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Kulková N, Babálová M, Brňová J, Krčméry V. Transferable Fluoroquinolone Resistance in Enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Isolated from Hemocultures. Cent Eur J Public Health. 2014;22(1):60-63. doi: 10.21101/cejph.a3884. PubMed PMID: 24844110.
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