Correlative Analysis Of Plasmid Mobility and antibiotic resistance within ColE1 Plasmids

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.