Tropical Journal of Pharmaceutical Research

Original Research Article | OPEN ACCESS

Mechanism of Klebsiella pneumoniae resistance to carbapenem antibiotics

Danxia Chen¹, Yan Zhu¹, Liangshan Hu¹, Xiaoyun Wu¹, Mingyou Li¹, HanHui Lin²

¹Department of Laboratory Medicine, Guangdong Second Provincial General Hospital, No.466 Xingang Middle Road, Haizhu District, Guangzhou 510317, Guangdong Province; ²Center of Faculty Development and Educational Technology, Information Science School and School of Statistics and Mathematics, Guangdong University of Finance and Economics, Guangzhou 510320, China.

For correspondence:- HanHui Lin Email: xgbn4q@163.com

Accepted: 29 June 2019 Published: 29 July 2019

Citation: Chen D, Zhu Y, Hu L, Wu X, Li M, Lin H. Mechanism of Klebsiella pneumoniae resistance to carbapenem antibiotics. Trop J Pharm Res 2019; 18(7):1519-1526 doi: 10.4314/tjpr.v18i7.23

© 2019 The authors.
This is an Open Access article that uses a funding model which does not charge readers or their institutions for access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), which permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited..

Abstract

Purpose: To investigate the mechanism of action of Klebsiella pneumoniae (Kpn) resistance to carbapenem.

Methods: The susceptibility of six Klebsiella pneumoniae strains to antibiotics was determined using K-B assay. Six isolated strains which were resistant to carbapenem were identified and collected using modified Hodge test. The phenotypes of metal enzyme were evaluated by ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid (EDTA) disk diffusion method. The genes for beta-lactamases, including KPC gene, were examined.

Results: The six carbapenem-resistant strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae were resistant to imipenem, meropenem and aztreonam, but were sensitive to amikacin, fosfomycin, minocycline, and polymyxin. The six pathogens did not produce metal enzyme, but they produced carbapenemases. Moreover, the six strains partially carried blaTEM or blaSHV gene, but all had blaKPC-2 gene.

Conclusion: These results suggest that the pathogens that contain blaKPC-2 gene may be involved in the mechanism of Klebsiella pneumoniae (Kpn) resistance to carbapenem.

Keywords: Klebsiella pneumoniae, ^6;-Lactamase, Carbapenemase, Resistance mechanism