Characterisation of multidrug-resistant Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli cultured from pigs in China: co-occurrence of extended-spectrum β-lactamase- and mcr-1-encoding genes on plasmids

•Ten colistin-resistant Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) from pigs in China harboured the mcr-1 gene.•Co-occurrence of extended-spectrum β-lactamase-encoding genes in all isolates.•Whole-genome sequences were determined for two isolates.•The colistin resistance gene of CQ09 and CQ10 was successfully transferred by conjugation.

Identification of Enterobacteriaceae harbouring the plasmid-mediated transferable colistin resistance gene mcr-1 presents a new challenge to public health. The aim of this study was to characterise multidrug-resistant Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) harbouring the mcr-1 gene on plasmids cultured from pigs in China. Using CHROMagar™ ECC plates combined with stx gene detection by PCR, 93 STEC were recovered from 326 faecal, 351 small intestine content and 326 colon content samples taken from healthy pigs in 2011 and 2012 in China. This study, in which ten colistin-resistant isolates with minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of 8–12 mg/L were identified and found to be positive by PCR for the mcr-1 gene, is a follow-up to an earlier investigation. Plasmid profiling by S1-nuclease digestion followed by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) identified several high-molecular-weight plasmids and these were typed by PCR-based replicon typing (PBRT). Two of the ten isolates, namely STEC-CQ09 (O116:H11/CC23/ST88) and CQ10 (O2:H32/ST3628), were selected for further study as described in this report.