Genomic Surveillance for Antimicrobial Resistance in Mannheimia haemolytica Using Nanopore Single Molecule Sequencing Technology

Disruptive innovations in long-range, cost-effective direct template nucleic acid sequencing are transforming clinical and diagnostic medicine. A multidrug resistant strain and a pan-susceptible strain of Mannheimia haemolytica, isolated from pneumonic bovine lung samples, were respectively sequenced at 146x and 111x coverage with Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION. De novo assembly produced a complete genome for the non-resistant strain and a nearly complete assembly for the drug resistant strain. Functional annotation using RAST (Rapid Annotations using Subsystems Technology), CARD (Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database) and ResFinder databases identified genes conferring resistance to different classes of antibiotics including beta lactams, tetracyclines, lincosamides, phenicols, aminoglycosides, sulfonamides and macrolides. Antibiotic resistance phenotypes of the M. haemolytica strains were confirmed with minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) assays. The sequencing capacity of highly portable MinION devices was verified by sub-sampling sequencing reads; potential for antimicrobial resistance determined by identification of resistance genes in the draft assemblies with as little as 5,437 MinION reads corresponded to all classes of MIC assays. The resulting quality assemblies and AMR gene annotation highlight efficiency of ultra long-read, whole-genome sequencing (WGS) as a valuable tool in diagnostic veterinary medicine.