RAC otherwise known as Repository of Antibiotic resistance Cassettes is a database that uses the automatic Attacca annotation system in order to comprehensively annotate gene-cassettes and transposable elements in a stream-lined manner and to discover novel gene cassettes. Antibiotic resistance is often due to horizontal gene transfer, which allows resistance to arise through cell-to-cell interaction. This poses a major challenge in the field of antibiotic resistance. Hence, the creation of RAC which would provide researchers a comprehensive and unique tool for the endeavor of documenting resistance due to gene-cassettes and transposable elements. Attacca helps discover novel gene cassettes when any three of the following occurs as mentioned in Tsafnat et al, 2011: the Attacca discovery heuristics (19) identify a gap in a cassette array that could correspond to a novel cassette; a cassette encoding a potentially novel β-lactamase variant is detected; or the type of sequence submitted (e.g. isolated cassette) suggests that a gene cassette should be present but a gene cassette is not found by Attacca. If any of these cases occur, the gene-cassette would be sent to review at the Centre for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, University of Sydney for further examination.
See also Antimicrobial Resistance databases
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