A key APUA research initiative, this project is trying understand the role of commensal bacteria (normal or harmless bacteria) in the spread of antimicrobial resistance.

It is compiling existing commensal isolate data and literature into a web-based bioinformatics tool. It also uses statistical, risk analysis, and mathematical modelling techniques to analyse the data to determine whether the frequency of antibiotic resistance genes in commensals can predict the subsequent emergence of antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacterial populations. The project has the capacity to award research sub-grants to fund research to produce the data it needs and has awarded 10 research sub-grants since 1997.

ROAR’s fully searchable database is open-access to other researchers in this field, and they can use it to analyse or to input data.

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