General Resistome

This marker evaluates your Resistome, that is, the complete catalog of antibiotic resistance genes present in the DNA of your gut ecosystem. Having a high-load resistome means your gut has become a "reservoir" or storage for superbugs. Although these bacteria are not causing you any illness at this moment, they represent a silent clinical risk: if you contract an infection in the future, usual medical treatments might fail.

Microorganisms have been at war with each other for millions of years, using natural antibiotics as weapons. To survive these attacks, they developed "biological shields": antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs).

The modern problem is that the widespread use of antibiotics in medicine has turned the human gut into a reservoir of resistance. Every time you take a broad-spectrum antibiotic, you wipe out vulnerable bacteria, but you accidentally select for those possessing the genes to survive.

Most alarmingly, bacteria possess an ability that humans do not: Horizontal Gene Transfer. If a harmless bacterium in your gut has a gene that makes it resistant to penicillin, it can "photocopy" that gene and gift it to an invading pathogenic bacterium (like an aggressive E. coli), arming it and making it invulnerable to certain antimicrobial treatments.

The load of your resistome does not affect your daily digestion, but it is a vital marker for your medical and epidemiological safety:

• Future Therapeutic Failure: If you develop an infection and the causative bacteria acquires certain resistance genes from your gut, the first-line antibiotics prescribed by your doctor may not work, prolonging the illness and its risks.
• Surgical Complications: People with a highly loaded resistome have a statistically higher risk of suffering serious and untreatable infections after common surgeries or treatments that depress the immune system (such as chemotherapy).
• Silent Transmission: You can be an asymptomatic carrier. You can transmit these commensal "superbugs" to vulnerable people in your environment (young children, the elderly, or immunocompromised family members) through daily contact.

The evaluation of the resistome is one of the most and unique applications of Shotgun metagenomic sequencing. Traditional tests (like plate cultures) can only detect the resistance of one bacterium at a time, as long as it grows in the laboratory. Metagenomics, on the other hand, scans all the DNA present in the sample.

Our bioinformatic pipeline maps millions of genetic reads against the database of antibiotic resistance genes. We quantify the relative abundance of genes that confer resistance to multiple classes of drugs, including: Beta-lactams (Penicillins, Cephalosporins), Tetracyclines, Macrolides, Aminoglycosides, Fluoroquinolones, etc.

The report details the genetic load for each antibiotic class. A high result in a specific class is important information that you can share with your doctor before antibiotic treatment. Clinical intervention in case of a highly loaded resistome does not imply taking more medication, but the opposite: avoiding the empirical use of antibiotics whenever possible and applying aggressive exclusion probiotic repopulation strategies to displace resistant strains.