Emergence of Antibiotic Resistance and Correlation with the Efflux Pump in Pseudomonas aeruginosa Isolated from Abidjan Hospital

Emergence of antibiotic resistance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa clinical strains is increasingly becoming a public health trouble shooting. The main objectives of the present study were to determine the resistance levels of different antibiotics used in therapy and to correlate the expression of four efflux pumps genes with the phenotypic resistance to antibiotics. 208 isolates of P. aeruginosa from the various biological products, stored from January 2012 to December 2015 at the Center of Biological Resources (CeReB) of the Institut Pasteur of C?te d'Ivoire have been assessed to clearly understand sensitivity of 14 antibiotics using diffusion method. As results, this work highly showed a clear emergence as regards the resistance of P. aeruginosa strains to the different classes of selected antibiotics. Nevertheless, high resistance was preferentially observed for ?-lactams, in particular for ticarcillin (30.77%). Colistin (2, 4%) was the most active antibiotic in this study. This work also demonstrated the correlation between the P. aeruginosa strains resistance and the efflux pump mechanism using RT-PCR techniques.83% of the ticarcillin-resistant strains expressed the constitutive mexB gene, 52% cefepime- resistant strains expressed regulated mexD gene, 59% of imipenem and ciprofloxacin-resistant strains expressed regulated mexF gene and finally 62% of gentamicin-resistant strains could express constitutive mexY gene.