In this research, we collected 34 TNAB isolates from a large tertiary care teaching hospital in Chongqing, China over a three-year period. The review of clinical information showed that TNAB strains in our hospital were primarily isolated from elderly patients and ICU patients with low immunity. According to the findings of antimicrobial susceptibility testing, the TNAB isolates were extremely resistant to the majority of therapeutically used antibiotics, with the exception of colistin. All the strains showed low-level resistance to tigecycline except one demonstrated a tigecycline MIC value of 32 mg/L. EPIs can impair efflux activity and restore the susceptibility to antibiotics. A study by Deng Mei et al. showed that both EPIs PAβN and CCCP were able to partially decrease the MIC of tigecycline[12]. In our study, 17.7% of TNAB strains had a 4-fold or greater decrease in the MIC of tigecycline when CCCP was present. However, the addition of PAβN actually increased the MIC of tigecycline, which contradicts previous reports. This suggests that PAβN and CCCP have different specificities and activities with regard to different efflux pumps. Additionally, there may be an antagonistic effect between PAβN and tigecycline.
Previous studies have proposed that elevated expression of RND efflux pumps contributes to tigecycline resistance in A. baumannii. In comparison to the sensitive reference strain ATCC19606, the relative expression of all three efflux pumps in TNAB of different MIC groups was elevated as shown in Fig. 3. However, none of the strains except TNAB-10 exhibited significant elevation of them simultaneously. This suggests that the three RND efflux pumps may act independently. Whereas a previous study by Damier et al. suggested that tigecycline resistance can be a result of the synergistic contribution of AdeIJK with AdeABC[19], of which AdeABC is considered to have a superior influence[12, 20, 21]. As indicated by Fig. 2, the best inhibitory effect of CCCP was achieved by the strains of MIC16, followed by the strains of MIC8. Among them, the strains of MIC16 were mainly up-regulated by adeB, and the strains of MIC8 had expression of adeG and adeJ elevated compared with other MIC groups. There is only one strain of MIC32, but it can be seen that the expression level of the three efflux pumps in this strain is not very high, and the difference is not statistically significant compared to the other strains. Therefore, we speculate that CCCP may have a better inhibitory response to adeABC. Moreover, the RND efflux pumps primarily mediates low-level tigecycline resistance in our strains. Overall, overexpression of the RND efflux pumps and the reversal of tigecycline resistance by CCCP in this study confirm that tigecycline resistance in A. baumannii is associated with an increase in efflux pump expression activity.
In recent years, mechanisms other than the RND efflux pumps that lead to decreased tigecycline sensitivity have been successively reported. Mutations in the rpsJ gene encoding the 30S ribosomal protein S10 can also lead to tigecycline resistance by modifying the tigecycline binding site in the ribosome [15]. Hua X et al. found that the rrf H33P mutation in tigecycline-treated strain XH1457 resulted in reduced ribosome recycling factor (RRF) expression, which in turn led to tigecycline resistance [16]. However, no mutations of the above related genes have been detected in this experiment. Chen et al. found a deletion mutation in the trm gene by whole genome sequencing of the tigecycline-resistant strain 19606-T8. They verified that the mutation in the trm gene led to a decrease in tigecycline sensitivity, while the wild-type trm gene restored tigecycline sensitivity[14]. All of the TNAB strains in our study had 240 nucleotide deletion mutations in the trm gene, which is in line with the findings of the previous investigation[22]. We hypothesized that this trm deletion mutation may be the result of tigecycline selective pressure in the clinical setting and may not be an independent induction mechanism for tigecycline resistance in strains that do not overexpress efflux pumps. Furthermore, the flavin-dependent monooxygenase encoded by the tet(X) gene and its variants can modify tigecycline, resulting in the development of tigecycline resistance. Recently, the plasmid-mediated tet(X3) and tet(X4) genes, have been reported to be associated with a high-level of tigecycline resistance in A. baumannii[23]. Meanwhile, Yu-Chia Hsieh et al. identified the tet(X6) gene in humans for the first time, which is the first report of tet(X) gene variants in Taiwan[11]. However, no strains in this study were found to harbor the tet(X) gene, and there have been no outbreaks of high-level tigecycline resistance A. baumannii at our hospital within the past three years.
Molecular typing revealed that the dominant sequence type of TNAB isolates in our hospital was ST195 (35.3%), followed by ST208 (17.7%), which aligns with previous study that identified ST208 and ST195 as the prevailing epidemic types of MDRAB in China[24–27]. Our study reports for the first time the clinical infections with TNAB of sequence types ST1849, ST540, ST938, ST381, and ST369. In addition, no outbreaks of the ST1849 clone have been reported in any country or region, except for one case registered at PubMLST in China, and there is no relevant literature. We need to be alert to the prevalence of these rarer sequence types, even though they all belong to CC92, which is the dominant clonal group in China.