2-AIN-506, 2-AIN-252: Seminar in Bioinformatics (2), (4)
Summer 2026
Abstrakt

Mislav Acman, Ruobing Wang, Lucy {van Dorp}, Liam P. Shaw, Qi Wang, Nina Luhmann, Yuyao Yin, Shijun Sun, Hongbin Chen, Hui Wang, Francois Balloux. Role of mobile genetic elements in the global dissemination of the carbapenem resistance gene bla(NDM). Nat Commun, 13(1):1131. 2022.

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Abstract:

The mobile resistance gene bla(NDM) encodes the NDM enzyme which hydrolyses 
carbapenems, a class of antibiotics used to treat some of the most severe 
bacterial infections. The bla(NDM) 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 bla(NDM) to remain poorly resolved. Here, 
we compile a dataset of over 6000 bacterial genomes harbouring the bla(NDM) 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 bla(NDM), which allows us to identify 
prevalent genomic contexts, mobile genetic elements, and likely events in the 
gene's global spread. We estimate that bla(NDM) 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 bla(NDM), but was overtaken in 
recent years by other elements including IS26-flanked pseudo-composite 
transposons and Tn3000. We found a strong association between bla(NDM)-carrying 
plasmid backbones and the sampling location of isolates. This observation 
suggests that the global dissemination of the bla(NDM) 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.