Viruses, Vol. 12, Pages 1060: Evaluation of Potential ARG Packaging by Two Environmental T7-Like Phage during Phage-Host Interaction

Viruses, Vol. 12, Pages 1060: Evaluation of Potential ARG Packaging by Two Environmental T7-Like Phage during Phage-Host Interaction Viruses doi: 10.3390/v12101060 Authors: Junlin Liu Peng Liu Fenglin Feng Junxuan Zhang Fulin Li Mianzhi Wang Yongxue Sun The increase in antimicrobial resistance is a threat to both human and animal health. The transfer of antibiotic resistance genes (ARG) via plasmids has been studied in detail whereas the contribution of bacteriophage-mediated ARG transmission is relatively little explored. We isolated and characterized two T7-like lytic bacteriophages that infected multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli hosts. The morphology and genomic analysis indicated that both phage HZP2 and HZ2R8 were evolutionarily related and their genomes did not encode ARGs. However, ARG-like raw reads were detected in offspring sequencing data with a different abundance level implying that potential ARG packaging had occurred. PCR results demonstrated that six fragments of genes (qnrS, cmlA, tetM, blaTEM, sul3, mcr-1) were potentially packaged by phage HZP2 and four (qnrS, cmlA, blaTEM, mcr-1) by phage HZ2R8. Further quantitative results showed that ARG abundance hierarchies were similar. The gene blaTEM was the most abundant (up to 1.38 × 107 copies/mL) whereas cmlA and qnrS were the least. Moreover, the clinically important mcr-1 gene was the second most abundant ARG indicating a possibility for spread through generalized transduct...
Source: Viruses - Category: Virology Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research