LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

Host-specific plasmid evolution explains the variable spread of clinical antibiotic-resistance plasmids

Photo by enchaxcreative from unsplash

Antibiotic resistance encoded on plasmids is a pressing global health problem. Predicting which plasmids spread/decline in the long term remains a huge challenge, even though some key parameters influencing plasmid… Click to show full abstract

Antibiotic resistance encoded on plasmids is a pressing global health problem. Predicting which plasmids spread/decline in the long term remains a huge challenge, even though some key parameters influencing plasmid stability have been identified, such as plasmid growth costs and horizontal transfer rates. Here, we show these parameters evolve in a strain-specific way among clinical plasmids/bacteria, and this occurs rapidly enough to alter the relative likelihoods of different bacterium-plasmid combinations spreading/declining. We used experiments with Escherichia coli and antibiotic-resistance plasmids isolated from patients, paired with a mathematical model, to show long-term plasmid stability (beyond antibiotic exposure) was better explained by evolutionary changes in plasmid-stability traits than by initial variation among bacterium-plasmid combinations. Evolutionary trajectories were specific to particular bacterium-plasmid combinations. Genome sequencing and genetic manipulation helped explain this, revealing epistatic (here, strain-dependent) effects of key genetic changes affecting horizontal plasmid transfer. Several genetic changes involved mobile elements and pathogenicity islands. Rapid strain-specific evolution can thus outweigh ancestral phenotypes as a predictor of plasmid stability. Accounting for strain-specific plasmid evolution in natural populations could improve our ability to anticipate and manage successful bacterium-plasmid combinations.

Keywords: antibiotic resistance; plasmid stability; plasmid; bacterium plasmid; evolution

Journal Title: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Year Published: 2022

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.