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antimicrobial resistance clinical microbiology computing group molecular dynamics publication research tuberculosis

New preprint: Predicting antibiotic resistance in complex protein targets

In this preprint, which Alice has been working on for several years, we show how alchemical free energy methods can predict whether an amino acid mutation confers resistance to an antitubercular, but only in cases where the change in binding free energy is large. This is mainly because the confidence limits on the change in […]

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antimicrobial resistance publication research tuberculosis

New Publication: Structure of MmpL3

Oliver Adams successfully elucidated the structure of the M. tuberculosis MmpL3 membrane transporter using cryo-EM and this has recently been published online in Structure. This was the main aim of his PhD studies in Simon Newstead‘s group in the Department of Biochemistry here in Oxford. It is an important protein structure since although other MmpL3 […]

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antimicrobial resistance clinical microbiology computing grants research tuberculosis

Postdoctoral position advertised

Through the CompBioMed2 EU Centre of Excellence project I have funding to appoint a postdoctoral researcher to develop machine-learning models to predict whether an infection is susceptible to an antibiotic. The need for predictive methods, such as these, will grow in the coming years as more of clinical microbiology transitions to using genetics to infer […]

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antimicrobial resistance clinical microbiology publication research tuberculosis

New print: Epidemiological cutoff values for a 96-well broth microdilution plate for M. tuberculosis

In this preprint, the CRyPTIC project proposes the maximum value of minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) for 13 different anti-TB drugs below which a sample can be considered to be ‘genotypically wild-type’. It is necessary to establish these values, called epidemiological cutoff values (ECOFFs or ECVs), so that the MICs measured can be converted into binary […]

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antimicrobial resistance clinical microbiology publication research tuberculosis

New publication: Phylogenetically informative mutations in genes implicated in antibiotic resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex

Although the population structure M. tuberculosis is clonal, one must be careful when inferring the effect of individual mutations on the effect of an antibiotic. Purely because a mutation appears to define a phylogeny does not mean it has no effect on the minimum inhibitory concentration. Read more here (Open Access).

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antimicrobial resistance clinical microbiology computing tuberculosis

AMyGDA now available from GitHub

AMyGDA is a python module that analyses photographs of 96-well plates and, by examining each well for bacterial growth, is able to read a series of minimum inhibitory concentrations for the antibiotics present on a plate. Previously it was only available to download from this website (due to licensing) if you gave your email address […]