ARES

ARES (Antibiotic Resistance Evolution Simulator) is a membrane computing-based model, able to simulate complex biological landscapes. It uses a nested membrane-surroundings entitites scheme formatted in a XML file.

The created scenarios emulate entities as: i) Resistance genes, able to detoxify antibiotics. These genes can be located in the plasmid, in conjugative elements or in the chromosome; ii) plasmids and conjugative elements transferring genes between bacterial cells; iii) bacterial cells; iv) individual microbiotas where bacterial species coexist; v) hosts containing the microbiotic ensembles; vi) environment(s) where the hosts are contained.

Our model facilitates the simultaneous analysis of several features of interest in the prediction of the rules governing the multi-level evolutionary biology of antibiotic resistance, according to a set of pre-established rules.

The input of ARES can be prepared with the ARES xml generator server: http://gydb.org/ares.