AMRready4KARL – Establishment of a quality-assured molecular surveillance strategy for municipal wastewater to detect Gram-negative bacteria carrying antibiotic resistance

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the greatest health threats of our time. In Europe, around 35,000 people die every year from bacteria against which many antibiotics are no longer effective. From July 2027, the revised EU Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (EU-UWWTD) will therefore require larger sewage treatment plants to monitor such resistance in wastewater using PCR tests. However, a wide variety of methods are currently being used for this purpose, and it is not yet clear which of these are best suited to wastewater samples and are sufficiently accurate. In particular, there is a lack of suitable materials for verifying the quality of the measurements. The AMRready4KARL project aims to close this gap. The project uses so-called virus-like particles (VLPs) as a safe test material. They contain the genetic information required to detect antibiotic resistance, but are themselves harmless and non-infectious. Thanks to their stable envelope, they are well suited for analysis in wastewater. This allows PCR testing methods to be reliably assessed and more effectively compared with one another.

More about the BMFTR funded AMRready4KARL project