What the next three weeks are about

This three week course will cover several topics on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacterial pathogens

In Week 1, you will learn what antibiotics are, how they work and what are the mechanisms of resistance that bacteria develop to antibiotics. This will point you to a wider picture of how antibiotics underpin modern medicine and why AMR is such a big problem.

In Week 2, you will then learn about laboratory techniques used to identify bacteria and test their antibiotic susceptibility. You will hear about a variety of advanced techniques used. Getting accurate results is very important as the results can impact clinical practice and data surveillance used to detect resistance, so you will learn about quality control embedded into using those techniques.

In Week 3, you will be introduced to the technologies and methods available to sequence and analyse bacterial genomes. We will investigate how antibiotic resistance genes and mutations can be detected in bacterial genomes and used to predict antibiotic resistance. Freely available online tools will be used to upload and interpret genomic data. We will investigate a real case of local, national and international transmission of AMR. You will also hear about the applications of bacterial genomics to the diagnosis and epidemiology of AMR.