Professor Mark Holmes

Antimicrobial resistance, Molecular Epidemiology, Clinical Veterinary Research, Evidence-based Veterinary Medicine

My group's focus of research followed our discovery, in 2011, of a new livestock-associated MRSA harboring a mecC gene. mecC MRSA was discovered during an epidemiological project looking at the transmission of S. aureus in dairy cows by a former PhD student in the group, Laura Garcia Alvarez. The original isolate was whole genome sequenced and analysed in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute by Matt Holden (now at St Andrews) and Julian Parkhill (now at Cambridge). We subsequently obtained funding from Defra and the MRC to investigate the discovery further. 
In collaboration with Prof Alexander Tomasz’s lab at Rockefeller University we published the results of a study into the function of the PBP2a produced by the mecC gene showing that it was differentially resistant to cephalosporins. We continue to work on the biology, evolution and epidemiology of mecC MRSA.

 

We have developed a Hi-C metagenomics wet-lab and bioinformatics pipeline able to examine antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes within individual species within microbiomes of interest. We have completed studies comparing high antibiotic use farms with low antibiotic use farms, groups of pigs over the course of antibiotic treatment, experimental infections of chickens with and without antibiotic treatment, and other studies looking at the dynamics of AMR genes in complex microbiomes.

 

We are members of the DETECTIVE consortium looking at AMR in Chinese hospitals with Prof Alan McNally and colleagues at the University of Birmingham. We lead the NEOSTAR project, a cross-disciplinary social science/microbiology project looking at links between agricultural and human antibiotic resistance in North East India.