Text mining for identification of biological entities related to antibiotic resistant organisms.

Antimicrobial resistance is a significant public health problem worldwide. In recent years, the scientific community has been intensifying efforts to combat this problem; many experiments have been developed, and many articles are published in this area. However, the growing volume of biological literature increases the difficulty of the biocuration process due to the cost and time required. Modern text mining tools with the adoption of artificial intelligence technology are helpful to assist in the evolution of research. In this article, we propose a text mining model capable of identifying and ranking prioritizing scientific articles in the context of antimicrobial resistance. We retrieved scientific articles from the PubMed database, adopted machine learning techniques to generate the vector representation of the retrieved scientific articles, and identified their similarity with the context. As a result of this process, we obtained a dataset labeled "Relevant" and "Irrelevant" and used this dataset to implement one supervised learning algorithm to classify new records. The model's overall performance reached 90% accuracy and the f-measure (harmonic mean between the metrics) reached 82% accuracy for positive class and 93% for negative class, showing quality in the identification of scientific articles relevant to the context. The dataset, scripts and models are available at https://github.com/engbiopct/TextMiningAMR.

Bacteriocin Producing Streptococcus agalactiae Strains Isolated from Bovine Mastitis in Brazil.

Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest health challenges of our time. We are now facing a post-antibiotic era in which microbial infections, currently treatable, could become fatal. In this scenario, antimicrobial peptides such as bacteriocins represent an alternative solution to traditional antibiotics because they are produced by many organisms and can inhibit bacteria, fungi, and/or viruses. Herein, we assessed the antimicrobial activity and biotechnological potential of 54 Streptococcus agalactiae strains isolated from bovine mastitis. Deferred plate antagonism assays revealed an inhibition spectrum focused on species of the genus Streptococcus-namely, S. pyogenes, S. agalactiae, S. porcinus, and S. uberis. Three genomes were successfully sequenced, allowing for their taxonomic confirmation via a multilocus sequence analysis (MLSA). Virulence potential and antibiotic resistance assessments showed that strain LGMAI_St_08 is slightly more pathogenic than the others. Moreover, the mreA gene was identified in the three strains. This gene is associated with resistance against erythromycin, azithromycin, and spiramycin. Assessments for secondary metabolites and antimicrobial peptides detected the bacteriocin zoocin A. Finally, comparative genomics evidenced high similarity among the genomes, with more significant similarity between the LGMAI_St_11 and LGMAI_St_14 strains. Thus, the current study shows promising antimicrobial and biotechnological potential for the Streptococcus agalactiae strains.