Abstract

Antibiotic resistance (AR) represents a challenge for the treatment of infectious diseases. Traditionally, antibiotic resistance determinants have been retrieved from culturable bacteria which represent a minor fraction of the total microbial diversity found in natural environments such as soils. In this review, we summarize recent advances in the study of antibiotic resistance using two main culture-independent approaches: sequence-based metagenomics and functional metagenomics.

Keywords: Antimicrobial resistance, antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), cloning, DNA sequencing, metagenomic library, metagenome, metagenomics, next generation sequencing (NGS), PCR amplification, resistance mechanism, resistome.