Host-Directed Omics Approaches to Tackle Antimicrobial Resistance

The rise of antimicrobial resistance underscores the need to develop rapid and robust methods to diagnose and treat infections and carry out surveillance to prevent disease spread. Antibiotic misuse largely contributes to AMR, and pathogens quickly find alternative routes to overcome treatment. However, pathogens depend primarily on the host’s cooperation to establish infection and survive. In-depth interrogation of biological interactions is possible using omics technologies, which generate and analyze multi-layered data. Omics approaches can help identify host perturbations necessary for infection establishment and tailor therapies and biomarkers. Technological advances in the past decade have given a solid platform to characterize host-pathogen interactions at genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic levels. In this chapter, we will discuss novel strategies to bolster host defense and provide a comprehensive review of the omics techniques and bioinformatics tools that can be leveraged to identify potential cellular targets and mechanisms of AMR.