Infections by microbes like bacteria and fungi that don’t respond to available antimicrobial treatments pose an increasingly dangerous public health threat around the world. In the United States alone, such infections kill 23,000 people annually. To better understand the molecular drivers behind resistance, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, recently conducted a whole-genome analysis of an unusual bacterial strain cultured from a patient in the United States. Their results are published this week in mBio, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.