DLact: An antimicrobial resistance gene database

Reema Singh, Suchir Arora, Harpreet Singh
Indian Council of Medical Research, V. Ramalingaswami Bhawan, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi-110029, India

Lactamase genes are the main cause of antimicrobial resistance in the bacterial pathogens. Here, we introduce DLact, a curated collection of lactamase like proteins. The availability of genomic data provided us an opportunity to develop such a database. Using the completely sequenced bacterial chromosomes and plasmids we identified putative antimicrobial resistance genes and have developed a database. The growing database currently contains 2021 lactamase like genes from 814 sequenced bacterial genomes. Of which 1972 (97.57%) were present on chromosome and only 49 (2.42%) were present on plasmids. Database content can be searched by using text and sequence queries. Diversity at the taxonomic, microbial ecology and domain length was studied. DLact database may be used to develop diagnostic primers and probes and in identifying pathways controlling/affecting the expression of antimicrobial genes. As the curated collection of sequences available for a protein-encoding gene, DLact provides a resource for researchers interested in comparative protein modeling and drug designing ,as well as those interested in broad subjects such as lateral gene transfer and Codon usage. We have also created in-house perl scripts for regular updation of the database. To share this resource with the scientific community, we have designed and implemented a web interface for DLact by using open source tools and it is available at http://ijmr.in/Dlact/.