Computational Analysis of the Relationships Between Antibiotic Resistance and Plasmid Backbone Genes

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are becoming one of the leading public health threats globally. Although, the presence of plasmid-encoded antibiotic resistance has been both extensively researched and well-documented, the relationships between antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and plasmid backbone structure have not. Understanding these relationships would provide important insight into the history of how bacterial plasmids have developed and the potential of plasmid backbones to acquire ARGs. This research aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the relationships between ARGs and plasmid backbone structure. By implementing a computational approach to characterize a large sample of plasmids representative of each incompatibility group, we determined what ARGs are most frequently associated with given plasmid backbones as well as common insertion patterns.