Integrative analysis of fitness and metabolic effects of plasmids in Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) mediated by the spread of plasmids fuels evolution in prokaryotes. Although plasmids provide bacteria with new adaptive genes, they also produce physiological alterations that often translate into a reduction in bacterial fitness. The fitness costs associated with plas...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	The ISME Journal 2018-12, Vol.12 (12), p.3014-3024
Main Authors:	San Millan, Alvaro, Toll-Riera, Macarena, Qi, Qin, Betts, Alex, Hopkinson, Richard J, McCullagh, James, MacLean, R Craig
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Bacteria Biological evolution DNA Replication DNA, Bacterial - genetics Evolutionary genetics Fitness Gene expression Gene transfer Gene Transfer, Horizontal Genes Genetic Fitness Metabolic response Metabolism Metabolomics Opportunist infection Physiology Plasmids Plasmids - genetics Prokaryotes Pseudomonas aeruginosa Pseudomonas aeruginosa - genetics Pseudomonas aeruginosa - physiology
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Summary:	Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) mediated by the spread of plasmids fuels evolution in prokaryotes. Although plasmids provide bacteria with new adaptive genes, they also produce physiological alterations that often translate into a reduction in bacterial fitness. The fitness costs associated with plasmids represent an important limit to plasmid maintenance in bacterial communities, but their molecular origins remain largely unknown. In this work, we combine phenomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics to study the fitness effects produced by a collection of diverse plasmids in the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1. Using this approach, we scan the physiological changes imposed by plasmids and test the generality of some main mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the cost of HGT, including increased biosynthetic burden, reduced translational efficiency, and impaired chromosomal replication. Our results suggest that the fitness effects of plasmids have a complex origin, since none of these mechanisms could individually provide a general explanation for the cost of plasmid carriage. Interestingly, our results also showed that plasmids alter the expression of a common set of metabolic genes in PAO1, and produce convergent changes in host cell metabolism. These surprising results suggest that there is a common metabolic response to plasmids in P. aeruginosa PAO1.
ISSN:	1751-7362 1751-7370