Identification of antibiotic resistance proteins via MiCId's augmented workflow. A mass spectrometry-based proteomics approach

Fast and accurate identifications of pathogenic bacteria along with their associated antibiotic resistance proteins are of paramount importance for patient treatments and public health. While mass spectrometry has become an important, technique for diagnostics of infectious disease, there is a need for mass spectrometry workflows offering this capability. To meet this need, we have augmented the previously published Microorganism Classification and Identification (MiCId) workflow for this capability. To evaluate the performance of the newly augmented MiCId workflow, we have used MS/MS datafiles from samples of 10 antibiotic resistance bacterial strains belonging to three different species: Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The evaluation results show that MiCId's workflow has a sensitivity value around 85% (with a lower bound at about 72%) and a precision greater than 95% in the identification of antibiotic resistance proteins. Using MS/MS datasets from samples of two bacterial clonal isolates, one being antibiotic-sensitive while the other (obtained from the same patient at different times) being multidrug-resistant, we applied MiCId's workflow to investigate possible mechanisms of antibiotic resistance in these pathogenic bacteria; the results showed that MiCId's conclusions are in agreement with the published study. Furthermore, we show that MiCId's workflow is fast. It provides microorganismal identifications, protein identifications, sample biomass estimates, and antibiotic resistance protein identifications in 6-17 minutes per MS/MS sample using computing resources that are available in most desktop and laptop computers, making it a highly portable workflow. This study demonstrated that MiCId's workflow is fast, portable, and with high sensitivity and high precision, making it a valuable tool for rapid identifications of bacteria as well as detection of their antibiotic resistance proteins. The new version of MiCId (v.07.01.2021) is freely available for download at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Yu/downloads.html.