Project Grant R01AI198596

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center $826,690 on August 20, 2026, for a Project Grant (R01AI198596) to advance antimicrobial resistance prediction through artificial intelligence and whole-genome sequencing.

The recipient will develop rapid, comprehensive, and accurate antimicrobial resistance (AR) prediction methods by integrating Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing and artificial intelligence. Work spans three aims: deriving comprehensive molecular features for AR prediction using Nanopore reads to create a supervised contrastive learning algorithm; developing protein structure-guided AR prediction models through a framework called Graph-BAR that uses in silico predicted 3D protein structures (such as AlphaFold) to assess functional impact of bacterial genetic variants and predict resistance even for unobserved mutations; and creating open-source software and cloud-based infrastructure to disseminate bioinformatics pipelines and AR prediction models to researchers. The project will analyze bacterial molecular features including single nucleotide polymorphisms, copy number variations, structural variations, and DNA methylation, converting genetic features into structure-based features for improved prediction accuracy on smaller datasets.

Place of performance is Dallas, Texas. The period of performance runs through July 31, 2031. The award is made under the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.855), which funds biomedical research and research training in infectious diseases and related areas through public and private nonprofit institutions and individuals.