Dissemination of Antimicrobial Resistance in Microbial Ecosystems through Horizontal Gene Transfer
By C. V. von Wintersdorff, John Penders, J. M. van Niekerk, Nathan Mills, S. Majumder, L. V. van Alphen, P. Savelkoul, P. Wolffs. Frontiers in Microbiology, 2016
1,517 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance among pathogenic bacteria has been a rising problem for public health in recent decades. It is becoming increasingly recognized that not only antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) encountered in clinical pathogens are of relevance, but rather, all pathogenic, commensal as well as environmental bacteria—and also mobile genetic elements and bacteriophages—form a reservoir of ARGs (the resistome) from which pathogenic bacteria can acquire resistance via horizontal gene transfer (HGT). HGT has caused antibiotic resistance to spread from commensal and environmental species to pathogenic ones, as has been shown for some clinically important ARGs. Of the three canonical mechanisms of HGT, conjugation is thought to have the greatest influence on the dissemination of ARGs. While transformation and transduction are deemed less important, recent discoveries suggest their role may be larger than previously thought. Understanding the extent of the resistome and how its mobilization to pathogenic bacteria takes place is essential for efforts to control the dissemination of these genes. Here, we will discuss the concept of the resistome, provide examples of HGT of clinically relevant ARGs and present an overview of the current knowledge of the contributions the various HGT mechanisms make to the spread of antibiotic resistance.
Subfields: Ecology, Molecular Medicine, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9b9fa157fb5064f0beffc6b95abf9df93e3ef06
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Citations in the corpus
- MOB-suite: software tools for clustering, reconstruction and typing of plasmids from draft assemblies (2018, positive): “This information is critical for evaluating the risk a plasmid poses for disseminating traits such as AMR through a population.”
- Microbial biofilm: formation, architecture, antibiotic resistance, and control strategies (2021, background): “Biofilm acts as a reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs, the resistome) which are found to be responsible for providing antibiotic resistance to pathogens through HGT [109] conjugation [110, 111], transformation [112], and transduction [113, 114].”
- Antibiotic resistome in the livestock and aquaculture industries: Status and solutions (2020, background): “…aquatic bacteria from aquaculture share a large number of MGEs, e.g., plasmids, integrative conjugative elements, integrons and transposons, significant genetic exchange and recombination can occur for various purposes (Elsas et al., 2003; Marti et al., 2014; von Wintersdorff et al., 2016).”