Bacterial Genotypic Drug Resistance Assays

The increasing emergence of antimicrobial multiresistance has significantly reduced the therapeutic options available for treating common bacterial infections. We are facing a serious worldwide health crisis but, paradoxically, this is also an exciting time since the rapid evolution of genomic technologies has facilitated the development of molecular tools to better diagnose, control the spread, and study the epidemiology of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. This review describes the known drug resistance mechanisms, weighs the importance of this new plague, and showcases the new rapid molecular diagnostic tests for detecting antimicrobial resistance, some of which already having a great impact by allowing clinicians to intervene rapidly (<1 h) instead of waiting 2–3 days for the result of culture and susceptibility testing. Some fully automated (sample-to-answer) nucleic acid-based tests for detection of microbial pathogens can now be used at the point of care (POC) but, in the future, POC tests for diagnosing antibiotic-resistant superbug infections should help to improve their treatment and control their dissemination.