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Role of mobile genetic elements in the global dissemination of the carbapenem resistance gene blaNDM

Acman, Mislav; Wang, Ruobing; van Dorp, Lucy; Shaw, Liam P; Wang, Qi; Luhmann, Nina; Yin, Yuyao; ... Balloux, Francois; + view all (2022) Role of mobile genetic elements in the global dissemination of the carbapenem resistance gene blaNDM. Nature Communications , 13 (1) , Article 1131. 10.1038/s41467-022-28819-2. Green open access

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Abstract

The mobile resistance gene blaNDM encodes the NDM enzyme which hydrolyses carbapenems, a class of antibiotics used to treat some of the most severe bacterial infections. The blaNDM gene is globally distributed across a variety of Gram-negative bacteria on multiple plasmids, typically located within highly recombining and transposon-rich genomic regions, which leads to the dynamics underlying the global dissemination of blaNDM to remain poorly resolved. Here, we compile a dataset of over 6000 bacterial genomes harbouring the blaNDM gene, including 104 newly generated PacBio hybrid assemblies from clinical and livestock-associated isolates across China. We develop a computational approach to track structural variants surrounding blaNDM, which allows us to identify prevalent genomic contexts, mobile genetic elements, and likely events in the gene's global spread. We estimate that blaNDM emerged on a Tn125 transposon before 1985, but only reached global prevalence around a decade after its first recorded observation in 2005. The Tn125 transposon seems to have played an important role in early plasmid-mediated jumps of blaNDM, but was overtaken in recent years by other elements including IS26-flanked pseudo-composite transposons and Tn3000. We found a strong association between blaNDM-carrying plasmid backbones and the sampling location of isolates. This observation suggests that the global dissemination of the blaNDM gene was primarily driven by successive between-plasmid transposon jumps, with far more restricted subsequent plasmid exchange, possibly due to adaptation of plasmids to their specific bacterial hosts.

Type: Article
Title: Role of mobile genetic elements in the global dissemination of the carbapenem resistance gene blaNDM
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-28819-2
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28819-2
Language: English
Additional information: Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords: Antimicrobial resistance, Bacterial genomics, Genomics, Molecular evolution
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10144935
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