0973-7510 Journal of Pure and Applied Microbiology 2581-690X DR. M.N. Khan 10.22207/JPAM.15.2.43 Prevalence of Transferable OXA-1 β-Lactamase Associated with Carbapenem-Resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae Isolates in Iraq Abbas Fatima Moeen Department of Biology, College of Sciences for Women, Babylon University, Iraq. 01 06 2021 15 2 877 882 Copyright © 2021 The Author(s) 2021 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This study was designed to explore the incidence of blaOXA-1 amongst Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates with resistant to carbapenem. Between December 2014 and April 2015, one hundred samples were taken from two hospitals: Babylon Teaching Hospital for Maternity and Pediatric / Babylon Province (clinical, umbilical infections, n= 40; environmental, n=20) and Karbala Hospital for Pediatric / Karbala Province (40 stool samples). All patients were hospitalized or attended these hospitals, all under 1 year of age. Seventeenth (17%) isolates were identified as Klebsiella pneumoniae. The antibiotic resistance profile of isolates was tested using disk diffusion method. High-level of resistance was recorded with ampicillin (94.1%) and piperacillin (88.2%) antibiotics. Resistance to carbapenem was reported in two K.pneumoniae isolates, these were investigated for the existence of OXA-1β-lactamase using Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technique. Two (100%) isolates gave positive result. Transference of this gene was studied by conjugation experiment. The blaOXA-1 gene conjugated successfully in 1 (50%) isolate only.

Keywords Klebsiella pneumoniae Carbapenem resistance OXA-1 b-lactamase PCR Conjugation