Title: Role prediction of Gram-negative species in the resistome of raw cows milk.

Biography:

Olga Nikoloudaki got her Bsc deegree in Food Science and Technology from University of Thessally (GR) and her Msc degree specialized in Food Biotechnology from Wageningen University (NL). Currently, she is doing her PhD in Food Engineering and Biotechnology at the Free University of Bolzano (UNIBZ) under the supervision of Prof. Marco Gobbetti. Her main research field is milk microbiota and its fermented counteparts with major focus in microbiome analyses with different culture dependent and independent methods. She has expertise on high throughput genomic and metagenomic approaches.

Abstract

Increasing prevalence of antibiotic resistance has become one of the major issues to global health, and raw cow`s milk and its derived products are some of the beverages and foods more susceptible. We predicted the presence of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) mainly correlated with Gram-negative bacteria in raw cow`s milks from South Tyrol (Northern Italy), chosen as model the system. Assessment of shotgun metagenome data revealed the existence of Pseudomonas sp. as the most abundant Gram-negative species in the raw cow’s milks bearing ARGs. Besides, ARGs were also linked to lactic acid bacteria such as Lactococcus and Lactobacillus sp. ARGs correlated to microbiome found in milks conferred resistance towards aminoglycoside-streptothricin, beta-lactamase, macrolide, tetracycline, carbapenem, cephalosporin, penam, peptide, penem, fluoroquinolone, chloramphenicol and elfamycin antibiotics. The analysis of metagenome assembled genomes (MAGs) recovered from the assembled scaffolds was suitable to investigate mobile genetic elements. Pseudomonas sp. (MAG 9) contained the oriT gene (origin of transfer gene) needed for transferring virulent factors, which demonstrated the importance of controlling the dissemination of such genes through the food chain.