New program can identify drug resistance from bacterial genomes

This is a wonderful contribution from a group that has been working in this field for a long time, and is further evidence that cheap and prevalent DNA sequencing will likely make its greatest near term impact in how we manage infectious diseases, not inheritable human diseases.

Why? Three quick reasons: (1) Sequencing bacteria is really cheap since their genomes are 1000x smaller than a human's. Viruses are even smaller. (2) Bacterial genetics is much simpler than human genetics, and we have reliable, well-developed tools for testing hypotheses in vivo (i.e. you can grow many generations of transformed bacteria in a Petri dish while exquisitely controlling their environment, but human genetic manipulation is out of bounds for almost all scientists for ethical reasons.) (3) Results from sequencing pathogens are generally more actionable--you can detect transmission or drug resistance which can inform changes in patient care, as opposed to say, finding a putative increased relative risk of diabetes or heart failure, which doesn't translate easily into a plan of care.

I wrote a open access article about this here: http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/61/11/1695.long

tdlr - "Scientists have developed an easy-to-use computer program that can quickly analyse bacterial DNA from a patient's infection and predict which antibiotics will work, and which will fail due to drug resistance."

Quick question, what sequencer are they using? Nanpore MinION (since the article refers to "laptop" sequencing) or Illumina?