Background: The emergence and prevalence of plasmid-mediated colistin-resistant bacterial strains in recent years have raised great concerns in clinical medicine. It is urgently needed to develop a cheaper, faster, simpler, sensitive, and specific molecular detection method to identify and monitor the dissemination of the transferable resistant determinants.
Methods and Results: Herein, eight pairs of primers were designed to set up a multiplex PCR method for the rapid and efficient determination of reported mcr  genes. This assay can give results within 85 min (35 min for amplification and 50 min for electrophoresis). We validated the feasibility of this assay by testing the presence of mcr  genes in 60 colistin-resistant isolates.
Conclusion: Our multiplex PCR technique exhibits remarkable advantages in the light of clear identification, efficiency of amplification, as well as the time consuming for detection, and thus could be useful for the surveillance and epidemiological research of plasmid-mediated colistin resistance, particularly for the under-resourced laboratories.
Keywords: multiplex PCR, colistin resistance, mcr  genes