Permissiveness of soil microbial communities towards broad host range plasmids

PhD Thesis, June 2015, DTU Environment Department of Environmental Engineering, Technical University of DenmarkHorizontal transfer of mobile genetic elements facilitates adaptive and evolutionary processes in bacteria. Among the known mobile genetic elements, plasmids can confer their hosts with accessory adaptive traits, such as antibiotic or heavy metal resistances, or additional metabolic pathways. Plasmids are implicated in the rapid spread of antibiotic resistance and the emergence of multi-resistant pathogenic bacteria, making it crucial to be able to quantify, understand, and, ideally, control plasmid transfer in mixed microbial communities. The fate of plasmids in microbial communities and the extent of bacterial phyla permissive towards plasmid receipt are largely unknown. Historically, methods exploring the underlying genetic and environmental factors of plasmid transfer have been heavily reliant on cultivation and expression of plasmid encoded phenotypes. This has provided an incomplete and potentially cultivation biased image of the extent of plasmid transfer. In this thesis, I investigated the extent of plasmid transfer in microbial communities at an unprecedented level of resolution and not reliant on cultivation. I focused on soil microbial communities. Their potential role as a reservoir for plasmids carrying antibiotic resistance genes is increasingly suspected to majorly contribute to the emergence of multi-resistant pathogens. More specifically, I examined what fraction of a soil microbial community is permissive to plasmids, identified the phylogenetic identity of this fraction and studied environmental factors that modulate plasmid transfer in soil microbial communities

From Pig Breeding Environment to Subsequently Produced Pork: Comparative Analysis of Antibiotic Resistance Genes and Bacterial Community Composition

It is well verified that pig farms are an important reservoir and supplier of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). However, little is known about the transmission of ARGs between the breeding environment and subsequently produced pork. This study was conducted to investigate if ARGs and associated host bacteria spread from the breeding environment onto the meat through the food production chain. We thus analyzed the occurrence and abundance of ARGs, as well as comparing both ARG and bacterial community compositions in farm soil, pig feces and pork samples from a large-scale pig farm located in Xiamen, People’s Republic of China. Among the 26 target ARGs, genes conferring resistance to sulfonamide, trimethoprim, aminoglycoside, chloramphenicol, macrolide, florfenicol, and tetracycline were observed at high frequency in both the pig breeding environment and pork. The prevalence of ARGs in pork was surprisingly consistent with breeding environments, especially between the pork and feces. The relative abundance of 10 representative ARGs conferring resistance to six classes of antibiotics ranged from 3.01 × 10-1 to 1.55 × 10-6 copies/16S rRNA copies. The ARGs conferring resistance to sulfanilamide (sulI and sulII), aminoglycoside (aadA), and tetracycline [tet(A) and tet(M)] were most highly abundant across most samples. Samples from feces and meat possessed a higher similarity in ARG compositions than samples from the farms soil. Enterobacteriaceae found on the meat samples were further identical with previously isolated multidrug-resistant bacteria from the same pig farm. Our results strongly indicate that ARGs can be potentially spreading from pig breeding environment to meat via the pork industry chain, such as feed supply, pig feeding and pork production

Novel assay to measure the plasmid mobilizing potential of mixed microbial communities

Mobilizable plasmids lack necessary genes for complete conjugation and are therefore non-self-transmissible. Instead, they rely on the conjugation system of conjugal plasmids to be horizontally transferred to new recipients. While community permissiveness, the fraction of a mixed microbial community that can receive self-transmissible conjugal plasmids, has been studied, the intrinsic ability of a community to mobilize plasmids that lack conjugation systems is unexplored. Here, we present a novel framework and experimental method to estimate the mobilization potential of mixed communities. We compare the transfer frequency of a mobilizable plasmid to that of a mobilizing and conjugal plasmid measured for a model strain and for the assayed community. With Pseudomonas putida carrying the gfp-tagged mobilizable RSF1010 plasmid as donor strain, we conducted solid surface mating experiments with either a P. putida strain carrying the mobilizing plasmid RP4 or a model bacterial community that was extracted from the inner walls of a domestic shower conduit. Additionally, we estimated the permissiveness of the same community for RP4 using P. putida as donor strain. The permissiveness of the model community for RP4 (at 1.16x10-4 transconjugants per recipient (T/R)) was similar to that previously measured for soil microbial communities. RSF1010 was mobilized by the model community at a frequency of 1.16x10-5 T/R, only one order of magnitude lower than its permissiveness to RP4. This mobilization frequency is unexpectedly high considering that (i) mobilization requires the presence of mobilizing conjugal plasmids within the permissive fraction of the recipients; (ii) in pure culture experiments with P. putida retromobilization of RSF1010 through RP4 only took place in approximately half of the donors receiving the conjugal plasmid in the first step. Further work is needed to establish how plasmid mobilization potential varies within and across microbial communities