Penicillin binding proteins
Outline
PBPs are proteins that can attach to \(\beta\)-lactam antibiotics like penicillin. These proteins are essential for making the bacterial cell wall, and when they are bound by penicillin, the antibiotic can disrupt this process. As a result, the growth and division of the bacterial cells can be impaired, making the antibiotic effective at killing or inhibiting the growth of the bacteria.
The PBP types shown in this document were obtained by using Pathogenwatch, which applies a PBP typing scheme developed in (Li et al. 2016) and evaluated in (Li et al. 2017). These studies demonstrated that the PBP types account for most of the variation in observed minimum inhibitory concentration \(\beta\)-lactam antibiotic, and perform better than other typing schemes such as MLST.
To identify small and novel mechanisms that contribute to penicillin resistance, it can be helpful to control for major effects. Therefore, it is important to consider PBP composition.
This document gives an overview of the PBP types present in collection which will control for in further analyses. The visualization can be used to explore the PBP types, how they are associated with MIC values, and how they are distributed through time in the different studies included in the collection. It is noteworthy that multiple PBP alleles are labelled as “new” in each of the genes PBP1a, PBP2b and PBP2x, and therefore that the effect of this allele composition has not been previously investigated.