Application of hAMRonization Tool in Investigating Anti-microbial Resistance Genes to Generate Harmonized Reports

Background Antimicrobial resistance has become a serious threat to global public health, with the potential to cause significant morbidity and mortality. Therefore, the detection and surveillance of antimicrobial resistance genes are critical to monitor the prevalence of resistance and to guide appropriate treatment decisions. Several bioinformatics tools have been developed to facilitate the detection and investigation of antimicrobial resistance genes from sequencing data. However, these tools often require a significant amount of manual curation and provide results which can limit their intra-operability, accessibility and usability. This lack of standardization in the reporting of antimicrobial resistance genes investigation greatly hinders the comparison of results across the public health sector. Method This study focuses on the application of hAMRonize tool developed by Public Health Alliance for Genomic Epidemiology. In this study, we have implemented hAMRonization to evaluate antimicrobial resistance genes in Salmonella and compared to the results from other tools (ARIBA, RGI, amrfinderplus and abricate). Result We observed that hAMRonize was more comprehensive than other tools in predicting genes, including information on antimicrobials, drug classes, and start and end base pair of genes, among others. The hAMRonize tool also provided results in an interactive Hypertext Markup Language format. Conclusion hAMRonization is an innovative tool for investigating and sharing antimicrobial resistance data in the current field of research, where scientists use a plethora of prediction tools that provide different results and subsequent interpretations.