MARDy

What is MARDy?

MARDy is a curated database of known resistance mechanisms and associated antifungal drugs. There are four major classes of drugs for the treatment of fungal infections: polyenes, azoles, echinocandins, and antimetabolites. Antifungal drug resistance is a complex phenomenon involving multiple mechanisms. MARDy includes resistances as a product of amino acid substitutions, tandem repeat gene sequences, and chromosome ploidy.

MARDy is the intellectual fabrication of Dr Johanna Rhodes of Imperial College London, and it was developed by Dr Anthony Nash of the University of Oxford. The service is hosted and maintained by members of the Fisher Group, directed by Professor Matthew Fisher of Imperial College London. Enquires can be directed through the email link found at the bottom of each page.

How to search

Search by gene name eg: CYP51a. Search by genus or species, or genus species eg: Candida, albicans, or Candida albicans. Search by drug name eg: Fluconazole.

How to analyse with BLASTn

MARDy hosts a local distribution of BLASTn and we permit single gene sequence alignment analysis against our own database of gene sequences. An example input sequence can be copied from here. The database contains a wildtype control sequence for each gene with at least one reported polymorphism in our database. Detected locations of changes to the wildtype gene sequences are returned in red along with the name of the matching gene and organism. During the initial implementation of MARDy, our BLASTn installation uses default BLASTn parameters (version 2.6.0). For further gene sequence search refinement, we recommend using the NCBI BLASTn web service and then search our database for potential genes.

How to download results

A successful search is accompanied by a link to a csv file at the bottom of the page. These are stored as files on the server and they can be saved through your browser. We recommend saving your data immediately after a successful search.

Database content

There are 36 genes, 27 organisms, and 29 drugs, in the database to date. This yields 232 amino acid substitution mechanisms, 5 tandem repeats and 2 ploidy variations.

How to contribute to MARDy

The inaugural database was curated by members of the Fisher Group of Imperial College London, however, it is possible for almost anyone to contribute to the MARDy service. Through the submission form found on the Contribution page, please provide sufficient data so as a member of the team can locate the published resistance mechanism. We aim to maintain at least a monthly database release and corresponding release notes can be found on the News page.