As the scientific community continues to gain knowledge with respect to the genetic mechanisms involved in providing resistance to various antibiotics, the design of additional sets of degenerate primers will be possible and will provide further opportunities for the use of PCR to rapidly and efficiently detect antibiotic resistance genes in complex microbial environments, including the human gut microbiota. Availability of supporting data The data sets supporting results of this article are available in the LabArchives repository, [http://dx.doi.org/10.6070/H42V2D1V].
Acknowledgements The authors wish to acknowledge GSK458 in vivo the advice, assistance and protocols received from Dr. Brian Jones and Dr. Lesley Ogilvie regarding metagenomic sample preparation and analysis. Additionally the authors acknowledge the gift of control bacteria strains from the Smalla laboratory, JKI, Braunschweig. Fiona Fouhy is in receipt of an Irish Research Council EMBARK scholarship and is a Teagasc Walsh fellow. Research in the PDC laboratory is also supported by the Irish
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