Abstract

THE EFFECT OF MICROBIAL SPATIAL SELF-ORGANIZATION ON TRANSFER OF ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE GENES

Author(s): Yinyin Ma

Range expansion is a general feature of surface-attached microbes. It involves the nonrandom assortment of microbes across space. This process is referred as spatial selforganization (SSO), which is a consequence of microbial behavior. SSO can generate spatial patterns that affect both ecological and functional aspects of microbial communities. Importantly, different spatial patterns can result in various magnitudes of intermixing, which further results in different frequencies of cell-to-cell contacts and different local population sizes. I hypothesize that SSO is an important determinant of plasmid-mediated horizontal gene transfer (HGT) and proliferation of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) within microbial communities. I predict that spatial patterns with greater intermixing between genotypes will promote HGT of ARGs due to more direct cell-cell contacts.