Colistin is the polymyxin antibiotic of last-choice for the treatment of human infections of clinically resistant gram-negative bacteria, such as Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (Tzouvelekis et al., 2012). Colistin is also used for therapeutic purposes in food-producing animals (Pardon et al., 2012). Until recently, colistin resistance was limited to chromosomal mutations (Landman et al., 2008). The situation changed in 2015 with the discovery of a plasmid-mediated mechanism of colistin resistance, the so-called mcr-1 gene described in bacteria isolated from animals, raw meat and hospitalized patients in China (Liu et al., 2016). Since then, the occurrence of the mcr-1 gene has been reported worldwide in humans, animals and environmental samples (Schwarz and Johnson, 2016). By 2019, another 9 mcr genes encoding colistin resistance in enterobacteria such as Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Acinetobacter baumannii (Carroll et al., 2019) have been sequentially described. There is only a limited amount of information on the prevalence of mcr genes in foods available in the Czech Republic. Therefore, in this study, we focused on evaluating the incidence of mcr-1 genes in chicken meat samples from the retail network, which are largely responsible for colistin resistance.