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Tracking Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) with Metagenomics: A Bioinformatics Workflow

By DSTC Research Council July 22, 2026 1 min read

The Silent Pandemic of Antimicrobial Resistance

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) poses one of the greatest global health threats of the 21st century. High-throughput shotgun metagenomic sequencing allows researchers to profile the complete antibiotic resistome within clinical, environmental, and agricultural samples without culture-dependent limitations.

Metagenomic AMR Analytical Pipeline

  1. Quality Control & Host Decontamination: Trimmomatic / FastP quality filtering followed by host DNA subtraction using Bowtie2.
  2. Resistome Profiling: Mapping reads against curated resistance databases (CARD, ResFinder, ARDB).
  3. Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) Detection: Identifying plasmid-borne resistance determinants and mobile genetic elements (MGEs) using assembly graph analysis.

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Learn hands-on pipelines to track antibiotic resistance genes, plasmid conjugation, and public health surveillance analytics.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between targeted PCR and metagenomic resistome profiling?

Targeted PCR only identifies pre-selected known resistance genes, whereas metagenomic sequencing discovers novel resistance variants, mutations, and plasmid-associated mobilomes across whole microbial communities.