Using game theory to identify antibiotic resistance
Thanks to machine learning and game theory, Washington State University researchers have developed a new way to discover unrecognized antibiotic-resistance genes in bacteria. This discovery was 93 to99 percent accurate in three different types of bacteria.
The researchers, including graduate student Abu Sayed Chowdhury and Professor Shira Broschat in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Douglas Call in the Paul Allen School of Global Animal Health, report on their work in the high-profile journal, Scientific Reports.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria is proving to be a growing and worrying nuisance around the world. Every year, millions of people are infected with drug-resistant pathogens and thousands of people succumb to pneumonia and other blood infections that are impossible to treat.
Currently, researchers are using genome sequencing to discover antibiotic-resistant genes by looking for similar sequences of genes in public databases. While this is ideal when dealing with known antibiotic resistant genes, it becomes daunting when dealing with new genes.
“There appears to be a vast reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes in the natural world,” said Call. “This tool allows us to identify presumed resistance genes that would not be recognizable based on simple sequence comparisons with public databases.”
In their study, the research team employed game theory, a tool used in several fields such as economics. The tool identifies how the behavior of one participant affects the other party.
Using ML and game theory approach, the researchers looked at the interactions of several features such as structure, physiochemical, evolutionary, and composition properties of proteins sequences.
“This novel game theory approach is especially powerful because features are chosen on the basis of how well they work together as a whole to identify likely antimicrobial-resistance genes — taking into account both the relevance and interdependency of features,” said Broschat.
Source: https://www.scitecheuropa.eu/using-game-theory-to-identify-antibiotic-resistance/97566/
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