# | Rank | Similarity | Title + Abs. | Year | PMID |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| 9727 | 0 | 0.9992 | Metal Toxicity and Resistance in Plants and Microorganisms in Terrestrial Ecosystems. Metals are major abiotic stressors of many organisms, but their toxicity in plants is not as studied as in microorganisms and animals. Likewise, research in plant responses to metal contamination is sketchy. Candidate genes associated with metal resistance in plants have been recently discovered and characterized. Some mechanisms of plant adaptation to metal stressors have been now decrypted. New knowledge on microbial reaction to metal contamination and the relationship between bacterial, archaeal, and fungal resistance to metals has broadened our understanding of metal homeostasis in living organisms. Recent reviews on metal toxicity and resistance mechanisms focused only on the role of transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and ionomics. This review is a critical analysis of key findings on physiological and genetic processes in plants and microorganisms in responses to soil metal contaminations. | 2020 | 30725190 |
| 9709 | 1 | 0.9992 | Role of Plasmids in Plant-Bacteria Interactions. Plants are colonized by diverse microorganisms, which may positively or negatively influence the plant fitness. The positive impact includes nutrient acquisition, enhancement of resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, both important factors for plant growth and survival, while plant pathogenic bacteria can cause diseases. Plant pathogens are adapted to negate or evade plant defense mechanisms, e.g. by the injection of effector proteins into the host cells or by avoiding the recognition by the host. Plasmids play an important role in the rapid bacterial adaptation to stresses and changing environmental conditions. In the plant environment, plasmids can further provide a selective advantage for the host bacteria, e.g. by carrying genes encoding metabolic pathways, metal and antibiotic resistances, or pathogenicity-related genes. However, we are only beginning to understand the role of mobile genetic elements and horizontal gene transfer for plant-associated bacteria. In this review, we aim to provide a short update on what is known about plasmids and horizontal gene transfer of plant associated bacteria and their role in plant-bacteria interactions. Furthermore, we discuss tools available to study the plant-associated mobilome, its transferability, and its bacterial hosts. | 2019 | 30070649 |
| 9583 | 2 | 0.9991 | Bacteriophages presence in nature and their role in the natural selection of bacterial populations. Phages are the obligate parasite of bacteria and have complex interactions with their hosts. Phages can live in, modify, and shape bacterial communities by bringing about changes in their abundance, diversity, physiology, and virulence. In addition, phages mediate lateral gene transfer, modify host metabolism and reallocate bacterially-derived biochemical compounds through cell lysis, thus playing an important role in ecosystem. Phages coexist and coevolve with bacteria and have developed several antidefense mechanisms in response to bacterial defense strategies against them. Phages owe their existence to their bacterial hosts, therefore they bring about alterations in their host genomes by transferring resistance genes and genes encoding toxins in order to improve the fitness of the hosts. Application of phages in biotechnology, environment, agriculture and medicines demands a deep insight into the myriad of phage-bacteria interactions. However, to understand their complex interactions, we need to know how unique phages are to their bacterial hosts and how they exert a selective pressure on the microbial communities in nature. Consequently, the present review focuses on phage biology with respect to natural selection of bacterial populations. | 2020 | 33170167 |
| 9249 | 3 | 0.9991 | Type IV secretion systems and genomic islands-mediated horizontal gene transfer in Pseudomonas and Haemophilus. Bacterial secretion systems, such as type IV secretion systems (T4SSs) are multi-subunit machines transferring macromolecules across membranes. Besides proteins, T4SSs also transfer nucleoprotein complexes, thus having a significant impact on the evolution of bacterial species. By T4SS-mediated horizontal gene transfer bacteria can acquire a broad spectrum of fitness genes allowing them to thrive in the wide variety of environments. Furthermore, acquisition of antibiotic-resistance and virulence genes can lead to the emergence of novel 'superbugs'. This review provides an update on the investigation of T4SSs. It highlights the role T4SSs play in the horizontal gene transfer, particularly in the evolution of catabolic pathways, antibiotic-resistance and virulence in Haemophilus and Pseudomonas. | 2015 | 25183653 |
| 9342 | 4 | 0.9991 | Natural transformation in Gram-negative bacteria thriving in extreme environments: from genes and genomes to proteins, structures and regulation. Extremophilic prokaryotes live under harsh environmental conditions which require far-reaching cellular adaptations. The acquisition of novel genetic information via natural transformation plays an important role in bacterial adaptation. This mode of DNA transfer permits the transfer of genetic information between microorganisms of distant evolutionary lineages and even between members of different domains. This phenomenon, known as horizontal gene transfer (HGT), significantly contributes to genome plasticity over evolutionary history and is a driving force for the spread of fitness-enhancing functions including virulence genes and antibiotic resistances. In particular, HGT has played an important role for adaptation of bacteria to extreme environments. Here, we present a survey of the natural transformation systems in bacteria that live under extreme conditions: the thermophile Thermus thermophilus and two desiccation-resistant members of the genus Acinetobacter such as Acinetobacter baylyi and Acinetobacter baumannii. The latter is an opportunistic pathogen and has become a world-wide threat in health-care institutions. We highlight conserved and unique features of the DNA transporter in Thermus and Acinetobacter and present tentative models of both systems. The structure and function of both DNA transporter are described and the mechanism of DNA uptake is discussed. | 2021 | 34542714 |
| 9718 | 5 | 0.9991 | Fitness benefits to bacteria of carrying prophages and prophage-encoded antibiotic-resistance genes peak in different environments. Understanding the role of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in adaptation is a key challenge in evolutionary biology. In microbes, an important mechanism of HGT is prophage acquisition (phage genomes integrated into bacterial chromosomes). Prophages can influence bacterial fitness via the transfer of beneficial genes (including antibiotic-resistance genes, ARGs), protection from superinfecting phages, or switching to a lytic lifecycle that releases free phages infectious to competitors. We expect these effects to depend on environmental conditions because of, for example, environment-dependent induction of the lytic lifecycle. However, it remains unclear how costs/benefits of prophages vary across environments. Here, studying prophages with/without ARGs in Escherichia coli, we disentangled the effects of prophages alone and adaptive genes they carry. In competition with prophage-free strains, benefits from prophages and ARGs peaked in different environments. Prophages were most beneficial when induction of the lytic lifecycle was common, whereas ARGs were more beneficial upon antibiotic exposure and with reduced prophage induction. Acquisition of prophage-encoded ARGs by competing strains was most common when prophage induction, and therefore free phages, were common. Thus, selection on prophages and adaptive genes they carry varies independently across environments, which is important for predicting the spread of mobile/integrating genetic elements and their role in evolution. | 2021 | 33347602 |
| 9723 | 6 | 0.9991 | Deciphering the genetic network and programmed regulation of antimicrobial resistance in bacterial pathogens. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria is an important global health problem affecting humans, animals, and the environment. AMR is considered as one of the major components in the "global one health". Misuse/overuse of antibiotics in any one of the segments can impact the integrity of the others. In the presence of antibiotic selective pressure, bacteria tend to develop several defense mechanisms, which include structural changes of the bacterial outer membrane, enzymatic processes, gene upregulation, mutations, adaptive resistance, and biofilm formation. Several components of mobile genetic elements (MGEs) play an important role in the dissemination of AMR. Each one of these components has a specific function that lasts long, irrespective of any antibiotic pressure. Integrative and conjugative elements (ICEs), insertion sequence elements (ISs), and transposons carry the antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) on different genetic backbones. Successful transfer of ARGs depends on the class of plasmids, regulons, ISs proximity, and type of recombination systems. Additionally, phage-bacterial networks play a major role in the transmission of ARGs, especially in bacteria from the environment and foods of animal origin. Several other functional attributes of bacteria also get successfully modified to acquire ARGs. These include efflux pumps, toxin-antitoxin systems, regulatory small RNAs, guanosine pentaphosphate signaling, quorum sensing, two-component system, and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) systems. The metabolic and virulence state of bacteria is also associated with a range of genetic and phenotypic resistance mechanisms. In spite of the availability of a considerable information on AMR, the network associations between selection pressures and several of the components mentioned above are poorly understood. Understanding how a pathogen resists and regulates the ARGs in response to antimicrobials can help in controlling the development of resistance. Here, we provide an overview of the importance of genetic network and regulation of AMR in bacterial pathogens. | 2022 | 36506027 |
| 8249 | 7 | 0.9991 | Biocontrol Traits Correlate With Resistance to Predation by Protists in Soil Pseudomonads. Root-colonizing bacteria can support plant growth and help fend off pathogens. It is clear that such bacteria benefit from plant-derived carbon, but it remains ambiguous why they invest in plant-beneficial traits. We suggest that selection via protist predation contributes to recruitment of plant-beneficial traits in rhizosphere bacteria. To this end, we examined the extent to which bacterial traits associated with pathogen inhibition coincide with resistance to protist predation. We investigated the resistance to predation of a collection of Pseudomonas spp. against a range of representative soil protists covering three eukaryotic supergroups. We then examined whether patterns of resistance to predation could be explained by functional traits related to plant growth promotion, disease suppression and root colonization success. We observed a strong correlation between resistance to predation and phytopathogen inhibition. In addition, our analysis highlighted an important contribution of lytic enzymes and motility traits to resist predation by protists. We conclude that the widespread occurrence of plant-protective traits in the rhizosphere microbiome may be driven by the evolutionary pressure for resistance against predation by protists. Protists may therefore act as microbiome regulators promoting native bacteria involved in plant protection against diseases. | 2020 | 33384680 |
| 8344 | 8 | 0.9990 | Role of environmental stresses in elevating resistance mutations in bacteria: Phenomena and mechanisms. Mutations are an important origin of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. While there is increasing evidence showing promoted resistance mutations by environmental stresses, no retrospective research has yet been conducted on this phenomenon and its mechanisms. Herein, we summarized the phenomena of stress-elevated resistance mutations in bacteria, generalized the regulatory mechanisms and discussed the environmental and human health implications. It is shown that both chemical pollutants, such as antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals, biocides, metals, nanoparticles and disinfection byproducts, and non-chemical stressors, such as ultraviolet radiation, electrical stimulation and starvation, are capable of elevating resistance mutations in bacteria. Notably, resistance mutations are more likely to occur under sublethal or subinhibitory levels of these stresses, suggesting a considerable environmental concern. Further, mechanisms for stress-induced mutations are summarized in several points, namely oxidative stress, SOS response, DNA replication and repair systems, RpoS regulon and biofilm formation, all of which are readily provoked by common environmental stresses. Given bacteria in the environment are confronted with a variety of unfavorable conditions, we propose that the stress-elevated resistance mutations are a universal phenomenon in the environment and represent a nonnegligible risk factor for ecosystems and human health. The present review identifies a need for taking into account the pollutants' ability to elevate resistance mutations when assessing their environmental and human health risks and highlights the necessity of including resistance mutations as a target to prevent antibiotic resistance evolution. | 2022 | 35691443 |
| 8410 | 9 | 0.9990 | Unveiling the role of phages in shaping the periodontal microbial ecosystem. The oral microbiome comprises various species and plays a crucial role in maintaining the oral ecosystem and host health. Phages are an important component of the periodontal microbiome, yet our understanding of periodontal phages remains limited. Here, we investigated oral periodontal phages using various advanced bioinformatics tools based on genomes of key periodontitis pathogens. Prophages were found to encode various auxiliary genes that potentially enhance host survival and pathogenicity, including genes involved in carbohydrate metabolism, antibiotic resistance, and immune modulation. We observed cross-species transmission among prophages with a complex network of phage-bacteria interactions. Our findings suggest that prophages play a crucial role in shaping the periodontal microbial ecosystem, influencing microbial community dynamics and the progression of periodontitis.IMPORTANCEIn the context of periodontitis, the ecological dynamics of the microbiome are largely driven by interactions between bacteria and their phages. While the impact of prophages on regulating oral pathogens has been increasingly recognized, their role in modulating periodontal disease remains underexplored. This study reveals that prophages within key periodontitis pathogens contribute significantly to virulence factor dissemination, antibiotic resistance, and host metabolism. By influencing the metabolic capabilities and survival strategies of their bacterial hosts, prophages may act as critical regulators of microbial communities in the oral cavity. Understanding these prophage-mediated interactions is essential not only for unraveling the mechanisms of periodontal disease progression but also for developing innovative therapeutic approaches that target the microbial ecosystem at the genetic level. These insights emphasize the need for more comprehensive studies on the ecological risks posed by prophages in shaping microbial pathogenicity and resistance. | 2025 | 40152610 |
| 8647 | 10 | 0.9990 | Eco-evolutionary strategies for relieving carbon limitation under salt stress differ across microbial clades. With the continuous expansion of saline soils under climate change, understanding the eco-evolutionary tradeoff between the microbial mitigation of carbon limitation and the maintenance of functional traits in saline soils represents a significant knowledge gap in predicting future soil health and ecological function. Through shotgun metagenomic sequencing of coastal soils along a salinity gradient, we show contrasting eco-evolutionary directions of soil bacteria and archaea that manifest in changes to genome size and the functional potential of the soil microbiome. In salt environments with high carbon requirements, bacteria exhibit reduced genome sizes associated with a depletion of metabolic genes, while archaea display larger genomes and enrichment of salt-resistance, metabolic, and carbon-acquisition genes. This suggests that bacteria conserve energy through genome streamlining when facing salt stress, while archaea invest in carbon-acquisition pathways to broaden their resource usage. These findings suggest divergent directions in eco-evolutionary adaptations to soil saline stress amongst microbial clades and serve as a foundation for understanding the response of soil microbiomes to escalating climate change. | 2024 | 39019914 |
| 9581 | 11 | 0.9990 | Lateral gene transfer, bacterial genome evolution, and the Anthropocene. Lateral gene transfer (LGT) has significantly influenced bacterial evolution since the origins of life. It helped bacteria generate flexible, mosaic genomes and enables individual cells to rapidly acquire adaptive phenotypes. In turn, this allowed bacteria to mount strong defenses against human attempts to control their growth. The widespread dissemination of genes conferring resistance to antimicrobial agents has precipitated a crisis for modern medicine. Our actions can promote increased rates of LGT and also provide selective forces to fix such events in bacterial populations. For instance, the use of selective agents induces the bacterial SOS response, which stimulates LGT. We create hotspots for lateral transfer, such as wastewater systems, hospitals, and animal production facilities. Conduits of gene transfer between humans and animals ensure rapid dissemination of recent transfer events, as does modern transport and globalization. As resistance to antibacterial compounds becomes universal, there is likely to be increasing selection pressure for phenotypes with adverse consequences for human welfare, such as enhanced virulence, pathogenicity, and transmission. Improved understanding of the ecology of LGT could help us devise strategies to control this fundamental evolutionary process. | 2017 | 27706829 |
| 9333 | 12 | 0.9990 | Exclusion systems preserve host cell homeostasis and fitness, ensuring successful dissemination of conjugative plasmids and associated resistance genes. Plasmid conjugation is a major driver of antibiotic resistance dissemination in bacteria. In addition to genes required for transfer and maintenance, conjugative plasmids encode exclusion systems that prevent host cells from acquiring identical or redundant plasmids. Despite their ubiquity, the biological impact of these systems remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate the importance of the exclusion mechanism for plasmid dynamics and bacterial physiology at the single-cell level. Using real-time microscopy, we directly visualize how the absence of exclusion results in plasmid unregulated self-transfer, causing continuous and repeated plasmid exchange among host cells. This runaway conjugation severely compromises cell integrity, viability, and fitness, a largely undescribed phenomenon termed lethal zygosis. We demonstrate that lethal zygosis is associated with membrane stress, activation of the SOS response, and potential reactivation of SOS-inducible prophages, as well as chromosome replication and segregation defects. This study highlights how exclusion systems maintain host cell homeostasis by limiting plasmid transfer. Paradoxically, this restriction is critical to the successful dissemination of conjugative plasmids by conferring a selective advantage, which explains their evolutionary conservation and underscores their role in the spread of antibiotic resistance among pathogenic bacteria. | 2025 | 40966505 |
| 9724 | 13 | 0.9990 | Characteristics of phage-plasmids and their impact on microbial communities. Bacteria host various foreign genetic elements, most notably plasmids and bacteriophages (or phages). Historically, these two classes were seen as separate, but recent research has shown considerable interplay between them. Phage-plasmids (P-Ps) exhibit characteristics of both phages and plasmids, allowing them to exist extrachromosomally within bacterial hosts as plasmids, but also to infect and lyse bacteria as phages. This dual functionality enables P-Ps to utilize the modes of transmission of both phage and plasmids, facilitating the rapid dissemination of genetic material, including antibiotic resistance and virulence genes, throughout bacterial populations. Additionally, P-Ps have been found to encode toxin-antitoxin and CRISPR-Cas adaptive immune systems, which enhance bacterial survival under stress and provide immunity against other foreign genetic elements. Despite a growing body of literature on P-Ps, large gaps remain in our understanding of their ecological roles and environmental prevalence. This review aims to synthesise existing knowledge and identify research gaps on the impacts of P-Ps on microbial communities. | 2024 | 39611587 |
| 9623 | 14 | 0.9990 | Prokaryotic toxin-antitoxin systems--the role in bacterial physiology and application in molecular biology. Bacteria have developed multiple complex mechanisms ensuring an adequate response to environmental changes. In this context, bacterial cell division and growth are subject to strict control to ensure metabolic balance and cell survival. A plethora of studies cast light on toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems as metabolism regulators acting in response to environmental stress conditions. Many of those studies suggest direct relations between the TA systems and the pathogenic potential or antibiotic resistance of relevant bacteria. Other studies point out that TA systems play a significant role in ensuring stability of mobile genetic material. The evolutionary origin and relations between various TA systems are still a subject of a debate. The impact of toxin-antitoxin systems on bacteria physiology prompted their application in molecular biology as tools allowing cloning of some hard-to-maintain genes, plasmid maintenance and production of recombinant proteins. | 2011 | 21394325 |
| 9838 | 15 | 0.9990 | Interactions between plasmids and other mobile genetic elements affect their transmission and persistence. Plasmids are genetic elements that play a role in bacterial evolution by providing new genes that promote adaptation to diverse conditions. Plasmids are also known to reduce bacterial competitiveness in the absence of selection for plasmid-encoded traits. It is easier to understand plasmid persistence when considering the evidence that plasmid maintenance can improve during co-evolution with the bacterial host, i.e. the chromosome. However, bacteria isolated from nature often harbor diverse mobile elements: phages, transposons, genomic islands and even other plasmids. Recent interest has emerged on the role such elements play on the persistence and evolution of plasmids. Here, we mainly review interactions between different plasmids, but also discuss their interactions with other genetic elements. We focus on interactions that impact fundamental plasmid traits, such as the fitness effect imposed on their hosts and the transfer efficiency into new host cells. We illustrate these phenomena with examples concerning clinically relevant organisms and the spread of plasmids carrying antibiotic resistance genes and virulence factors. | 2019 | 30771401 |
| 9240 | 16 | 0.9990 | CRISPR-Cas-Mediated Phage Resistance Enhances Horizontal Gene Transfer by Transduction. A powerful contributor to prokaryotic evolution is horizontal gene transfer (HGT) through transformation, conjugation, and transduction, which can be advantageous, neutral, or detrimental to fitness. Bacteria and archaea control HGT and phage infection through CRISPR-Cas (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-CRISPR-associated proteins) adaptive immunity. Although the benefits of resisting phage infection are evident, this can come at a cost of inhibiting the acquisition of other beneficial genes through HGT. Despite the ability of CRISPR-Cas to limit HGT through conjugation and transformation, its role in transduction is largely overlooked. Transduction is the phage-mediated transfer of bacterial DNA between cells and arguably has the greatest impact on HGT. We demonstrate that in Pectobacterium atrosepticum, CRISPR-Cas can inhibit the transduction of plasmids and chromosomal loci. In addition, we detected phage-mediated transfer of a large plant pathogenicity genomic island and show that CRISPR-Cas can inhibit its transduction. Despite these inhibitory effects of CRISPR-Cas on transduction, its more common role in phage resistance promotes rather than diminishes HGT via transduction by protecting bacteria from phage infection. This protective effect can also increase transduction of phage-sensitive members of mixed populations. CRISPR-Cas systems themselves display evidence of HGT, but little is known about their lateral dissemination between bacteria and whether transduction can contribute. We show that, through transduction, bacteria can acquire an entire chromosomal CRISPR-Cas system, including cas genes and phage-targeting spacers. We propose that the positive effect of CRISPR-Cas phage immunity on enhancing transduction surpasses the rarer cases where gene flow by transduction is restricted.IMPORTANCE The generation of genetic diversity through acquisition of DNA is a powerful contributor to microbial evolution and occurs through transformation, conjugation, and transduction. Of these, transduction, the phage-mediated transfer of bacterial DNA, is arguably the major route for genetic exchange. CRISPR-Cas adaptive immune systems control gene transfer by conjugation and transformation, but transduction has been mostly overlooked. Our results indicate that CRISPR-Cas can impede, but typically enhances the transduction of plasmids, chromosomal genes, and pathogenicity islands. By limiting wild-type phage replication, CRISPR-Cas immunity increases transduction in both phage-resistant and -sensitive members of mixed populations. Furthermore, we demonstrate mobilization of a chromosomal CRISPR-Cas system containing phage-targeting spacers by generalized transduction, which might partly account for the uneven distribution of these systems in nature. Overall, the ability of CRISPR-Cas to promote transduction reveals an unexpected impact of adaptive immunity on horizontal gene transfer, with broader implications for microbial evolution. | 2018 | 29440578 |
| 9717 | 17 | 0.9990 | Bacterial Transformation Buffers Environmental Fluctuations through the Reversible Integration of Mobile Genetic Elements. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) promotes the spread of genes within bacterial communities. Among the HGT mechanisms, natural transformation stands out as being encoded by the bacterial core genome. Natural transformation is often viewed as a way to acquire new genes and to generate genetic mixing within bacterial populations. Another recently proposed function is the curing of bacterial genomes of their infectious parasitic mobile genetic elements (MGEs). Here, we propose that these seemingly opposing theoretical points of view can be unified. Although costly for bacterial cells, MGEs can carry functions that are at points in time beneficial to bacteria under stressful conditions (e.g., antibiotic resistance genes). Using computational modeling, we show that, in stochastic environments, an intermediate transformation rate maximizes bacterial fitness by allowing the reversible integration of MGEs carrying resistance genes, although these MGEs are costly for host cell replication. Based on this dual function (MGE acquisition and removal), transformation would be a key mechanism for stabilizing the bacterial genome in the long term, and this would explain its striking conservation.IMPORTANCE Natural transformation is the acquisition, controlled by bacteria, of extracellular DNA and is one of the most common mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer, promoting the spread of resistance genes. However, its evolutionary function remains elusive, and two main roles have been proposed: (i) the new gene acquisition and genetic mixing within bacterial populations and (ii) the removal of infectious parasitic mobile genetic elements (MGEs). While the first one promotes genetic diversification, the other one promotes the removal of foreign DNA and thus genome stability, making these two functions apparently antagonistic. Using a computational model, we show that intermediate transformation rates, commonly observed in bacteria, allow the acquisition then removal of MGEs. The transient acquisition of costly MGEs with resistance genes maximizes bacterial fitness in environments with stochastic stress exposure. Thus, transformation would ensure both a strong dynamic of the bacterial genome in the short term and its long-term stabilization. | 2020 | 32127449 |
| 6449 | 18 | 0.9990 | Microbial regulation of natural antibiotic resistance: Understanding the protist-bacteria interactions for evolution of soil resistome. The emergence, evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in the environment represent a global threat to human health. Our knowledge of antibiotic resistance in human-impacted ecosystems is rapidly growing with antibiotic use, organic fertilization and wastewater irrigation identified as key selection pressures. However, the importance of biological interactions, especially predation and competition, as a potential driver of antibiotic resistance in the natural environment with limited anthropogenic disturbance remains largely overlooked. Stress-affected bacteria develop resistance to maximize competition and survival, and similarly bacteria may develop resistance to fight stress under the predation pressure of protists, an essential component of the soil microbiome. In this article, we summarized the major findings for the prevalence of natural ARGs on our planet and discussed the potential selection pressures driving the evolution and development of antibiotic resistance in natural settings. This is the first article that reviewed the potential links between protists and the antibiotic resistance of bacteria, and highlighted the importance of predation by protists as a crucial selection pressure of antibiotic resistance in the absence of anthropogenic disturbance. We conclude that an improved ecological understanding of the protists-bacteria interactions and other biological relationships would greatly expand our ability to predict and mitigate the environmental antibiotic resistance under the context of global change. | 2020 | 31818598 |
| 8286 | 19 | 0.9990 | RNA Modifications in Pathogenic Bacteria: Impact on Host Adaptation and Virulence. RNA modifications are involved in numerous biological processes and are present in all RNA classes. These modifications can be constitutive or modulated in response to adaptive processes. RNA modifications play multiple functions since they can impact RNA base-pairings, recognition by proteins, decoding, as well as RNA structure and stability. However, their roles in stress, environmental adaptation and during infections caused by pathogenic bacteria have just started to be appreciated. With the development of modern technologies in mass spectrometry and deep sequencing, recent examples of modifications regulating host-pathogen interactions have been demonstrated. They show how RNA modifications can regulate immune responses, antibiotic resistance, expression of virulence genes, and bacterial persistence. Here, we illustrate some of these findings, and highlight the strategies used to characterize RNA modifications, and their potential for new therapeutic applications. | 2021 | 34440299 |