Positive and Negative Effects of Metal Oxide Nanoparticles on Antibiotic Resistance Genes Transfer

Abstract

Rapid development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria is a critical public health problem in the world. One of the main routes of resistance development is the transfer of genes containing antibiotic resistance cassettes. Gene transfer can be done through horizontal transfer of genes: transduction, conjugation, and transformation. Many factors in the environment influence these processes, and one of them is the action of metal oxide nanoparticles (MONPs), which can appear in the milieu through both biological synthesis and the release of engineered nanomaterial. In this study, the effect of AlOOH, CuO, Fe3O4, TiO2, and ZnO MONPs on the transformation (heat shock transformation) of bacteria Escherichia coli K12, and the conjugation between E. coli cc118 and E. coli Nova Blue were studied. The MONPs were synthesized by one method and fully characterized. ZnO nanoparticles (NPs) have significantly increased the efficiency of transformation (more than 9-fold), while the other NPs have reduced it to 31 times (TiO2 NPs). AlOOH NPs increased the number of transconjugants more than 1.5-fold, while CuO and Fe3O4 NPs did not have a significant effect on transformation and conjugation. Thus, the data shows that different types of MONPs can enhance or inhibit different gene transfer mechanisms, affecting the spread of antibiotic resistance genes.

Recurrence and propagation of past functions through mineral facilitated horizontal gene transfer

“…18 Similar effects were observed for magnetite and nano-Al 2 O 3 which increased transformation of antibiotic resistance genes in E. coli by altering membrane permeability. 43,44 In addition, flagellar motility was reduced through bacterial association with phyllosilicate minerals causing downregulation of competency genes and reduced transformation. 19 In our study, we added cells at maximum competence to the mineral suspension.…”

Evaluating the impact of heavy metals on antimicrobial resistance in the primary food production environment: A scoping review

“…Among the integrons, class 1, which is frequently linked with ARGs and MRGs (Gillings et al, 2015), was the most commonly detected (n = 30), followed by class 2 (n = 14), 3 and 4 (n = 2 and n = 1, respectively). Four studies assessed the presence of plasmid mediated quinolone resistance (PMQR) (Gallo et al, 2019;Siddiqui et al, 2020;Tuo et al, 2018;Xu et al, 2017) and seven examined plasmid mediated beta lactam resistance (Figueiredo et al, 2019;Otinov et al, 2020;Pu et al, 2021a;Pu et al, 2021b;Wang et al, 2020;Wilson et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2018c). In some cases (n = 9), an experiment was conducted to evaluate the mobility of resistance genes (conjugation transfer of ARGs) (Supplementary Table 2).…”

“…In this case, heavy metals were involved in generation of reactive oxygen species, alteration of expression of conjugation related genes, and an increase of in cell membrane permeability (Zhang et al, 2018c). Otinov et al (2020) highlighted that some metal oxide nanoparticles (MONPs), such as zinc-oxide (ZnO) and boehmite (AlOOH), can enhance the efficacy of transformation and conjugation, respectively, while others, such as titanium dioxide (TiO 2 ) can inhibit transfer mechanisms.…”

Bacteriophages: Underestimated vehicles of antibiotic resistance genes in the soil

“…Recently, some studies have found that nano-metal oxide particles have an effect on the horizontal transfer of ARGs ( Hu et al, 2019b ; Otinov et al, 2020 ; Li and Zhang, 2022 ). Han et al (2020) conducted an experiment using phage gM13 and E.coli exposed to nano-TiO 2 , and the results showed that nano-TiO 2 increases the transduction frequency up to 4.5 fold compared to the control.…”