Abstract
Background: Uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) is being the most prevalent agent of causing infection in the urinary system of a human being thus takes place by nosocomial and community level spread. An alarming increase in drug resistance on UPEC isolates over the decade is being a serious concern of public health. To address that in this study we have screened the group of UPEC isolates for the presence of various antibiotic resistance genes, virulence-associated genes, and also carried out molecular sequence typing, conjugation assay to type the UPEC strains and evaluate horizontal gene transfer. Methods: Here, Multilocus sequence typing and identification of O25b-ST131 isolates based on allele specific PCR method was applied to screen the virulence profile of UPEC. Result: As a result, we have found that the ESBL, AmpC, NDM, sul, qnr genes, various virulence genes such as fimH, afa, kpsMT KII, kpsMT K1, kpsMT K5, fyuA, iroN, ireA, iutA, hlyA, cnf1 which involve in following respective mechanisms of adherence, capsule synthesis, iron uptake system, toxins on different UPEC isolates. In addition to that, we investigated the horizontal gene transferability of those selective isolates and the respective sequence types of all isolates. Conclusion: To conclude that the abundant level of fyuA (87%) the yersiniabactin receptor coding gene among the virulence genes, on most of the MDR isolates majorly ST131 suggests that it could become the possible target of anti-virulence to combat multidrug resistance effectively in the future. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).