Integrative metanalyses: hospital renovation strategies to face Antimicrobial Resistance

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is threatening human and environmental health. In hospitals, the usage of disinfectants and antibiotics as non-specific cleaning strategies acts as heavy evolutionary pressures on the environmental microbiota. This results in the selection of resistance traits in pathogenic species and prompts non-curable hospital-acquired infections. The presented work exploits >5000 publicly available surface samples (16S rRNA amplicon sequencing) from hospitals around the world and aims to bioinformatically detangle hospitals' complex ecological dynamics establishing a detailed global-scale map of the hospital microbiome. The long-term impacts of this approach are AMR monitoring and predictive methods. The invisible ecosystem that hides in our hospitals has immense impacts on our health but scientists rarely communicate the derived massive amount of data and their implications efficiently. A change is urgent and visuals can fill this gap by merging scientific rigor with images. The images can evoke empathic reactions and this links emotions and scientific knowledge making communication efficient. My aim is to genuinely fuse art and science.