The Antibiotic Resistance Ontology describes antibiotic resistance genes and mutations, their products, mechanisms, and associated phenotypes, as well as antibiotics and their molecular targets. It is integrated with the Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database (https://card.mcmaster.ca), a curated resource containing high-quality reference data on the molecular basis of antimicrobial resistance.
Ontologies at the Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database are freely available under the Creative Commons CC-BY license version 4.0.
Curation of the ARO by the CARD team is currently in housekeeping mode, i.e., only the addition of newly reported AMR genes but no major restructuring of the ontology or its relationships, with the exception of introduction of anti-fungal resistance terms and more subtle ontological descriptions of bacterial efflux.
Updates are released every 1-3 months here and at the CARD website. This repo (https://github.com/arpcard/aro) does not accept pull requests, but instead only reflects the latest release at card.mcmaster.ca. Please request additions or modifications to the ARO either here via https://github.com/arpcard/aro/issues or at https://github.com/arpcard/amr_curation. The curation team will work with you to incorporate your suggestions into the next release of the ARO.
The next major phase of ARO development has begun, addressing issues of orthogonality and fundamental ontological design, at ARO Next. ARO Next development will be independent of the CARD website and ongoing curation, so for the time being continue to use this repository as a mirror for active curation at the Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database. ARO Next will replace the version of ARO available in this repository and at CARD at a later date.
Community input into ARO Next is very welcome.
The latest version of the ontology can always be found at:
http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/aro.owl
(note this will not show up until the request has been approved by obofoundry.org)
Please contact us at card@mcmaster.ca.
