Antibiotic resistance is a serious topic in the medical community, as new drugs are developed and used for the treatment of infections these bacteria have the potential of evolving countermeasures to help themselves survive and resist such drugs. This works through the process of natural selection, as antibiotics kill off bacteria the ones that survive are likely to randomly have some resistance to these drugs and will thrive as their competition is killed off leading to further spread of antibiotic-resistant organisms increasing the chance that they will infect others. This leads to larger amounts of bacteria strains with these resistances and causes problems like hard-to-treat infections and sepsis.
MecA is an antibiotic resistance gene that offers protection against members of the penicillin family such as Methicillin and Oxacillin which are used to treat against members of the staphylococcus genus. These drugs work by binding to proteins responsible for maintaining and growing the cell wall and acting as competitive inhibitors that stop the proteins production. Interfering with the growth and integrity of the cell wall leads to cell death through holes in the cell leaking cytoplasm and autolysis. The MecA gene is a mutation of the code for this protein that aids in constructing the cell wall and lowers its affinity to bind to the antibiotics making it a less effective inhibitor. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus also known as MRSA is one of the most commonly known types of bacteria with this resistance and has become a pandemic in regard to global health.
Solaris Diagnostic Laboratories can detect this as well as other types of antibiotic resistances and can typically provide results on such tests within 24 hours of receiving the sample. Testing is professionally done with our high accuracy assays.
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Now you can provide patients with the quickest and most accurate diagnosis possible from our high-complexity, CLIA accredited laboratory. Choose Solaris Diagnostics for:
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