Abstract:
Antibiotic resistance in bacteria remains a major
global health challenge in the control of infectious diseases.
Antibiotic resistance genes are frequently transferred across
bacterial communities by mobile genetic elements such as plasmids.
The majority of plasmids possess genes that allow them to replicate
and transfer efficiently in various bacterial hosts. The plasmids in
the ColE1 family have a series of mobility genes (mbeA, mbeB,
mbeC, mbeD, and mbeE), which makes the plasmid mobilizable.
However, the relationship between this mobilizable plasmid group
and antibiotic resistance genes is not well understood. The mbeC
gene, is the biggest and most important of the mobility genes of the
ColE1 plasmids, this gene has been shown to display variation of
occurrence (presence or absence) in antibiotic resistance plasmids
and non-antibiotic resistance plasmids of the same family of
plasmids. Using a bioinformatics approach, the differences in DNA
sequences available in various online databases can be analysed by
comparing the several genes associated with plasmid mobility. The
innovative aspect of this research is that it provides the opportunity
for development of robust molecular detection tools for tracking of
specific types of plasmids with antibiotic resistance genotypes in
clinical and environmental samples. This bioinformatics analysis
approach is applicable anywhere and particularly important to low
income countries as it does not require one to conduct in vivo
experiments such as DNA sequencing for the study of plasmids or
other genetic elements.