Document Type
Article
Language
eng
Publication Date
5-2020
Publisher
American Society for Microbiology
Source Publication
mBio
Source ISSN
2150-7511
Abstract
Different species exposed to a common stress may adapt by mutations in shared pathways or in unique systems, depending on how past environments have molded their genomes. Understanding how diverse bacterial pathogens evolve in response to an antimicrobial treatment is a pressing example of this problem, where discovery of molecular parallelism could lead to clinically useful predictions. Evolution experiments with pathogens in environments containing antibiotics, combined with periodic whole-population genome sequencing, can be used to identify many contending routes to antimicrobial resistance. We separately propagated two clinically relevant Gram-negative pathogens, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii, in increasing concentrations of tobramycin in two different environments each: planktonic and biofilm. Independently of the pathogen, the populations adapted to tobramycin selection by parallel evolution of mutations in fusA1, encoding elongation factor G, and ptsP, encoding phosphoenolpyruvate phosphotransferase. As neither gene is a direct target of this aminoglycoside, mutations to either are unexpected and underreported causes of resistance. Additionally, both species acquired antibiotic resistance-associated mutations that were more prevalent in the biofilm lifestyle than in the planktonic lifestyle; these mutations were in electron transport chain components in A. baumannii and lipopolysaccharide biosynthesis enzymes in P. aeruginosa populations. Using existing databases, we discovered site-specific parallelism of fusA1 mutations that extends across bacterial phyla and clinical isolates. This study suggests that strong selective pressures, such as antibiotic treatment, may result in high levels of predictability in molecular targets of evolution, despite differences between organisms’ genetic backgrounds and environments.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Scribner, Michelle R.; Santos-Lopez, Alfonso; Marshall, Christopher; Deitrick, Christopher; and Cooper, Vaughn S., "Parallel Evolution of Tobramycin Resistance Across Species and Environments" (2020). Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications. 818.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/bio_fac/818
Comments
Published version. mBio, Vol. 11, No. 3 (May 2020): e00932-20. DOI. © 2020 Scribner et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.