Communities of plasmids as strategies for antimicrobial resistance gene survival in wastewater treatment plant effluent
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plasmids facilitate antimicrobial resistance (AMR) gene spread via horizontal gene transfer, yet the mobility of genes in wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) resistomes remains unclear. We sequenced 173 circularised plasmids transferred from WWTP effluent into Escherichia coli and characterised their genetic content. Multiple multidrug-resistant plasmids were identified, with a significant number of mega-plasmids (>100 kb). Almost all plasmids detected existed with other plasmids i.e. as communities rather than lone entities. These plasmid communities enabled non-AMR plasmids to survive antimicrobial selection by co-existing with resistant partners. Our data demonstrates the highly variable nature of plasmids in addition to their capacity to carry mobile elements and genes within these highly variable regions. The impact of these variations on plasmid ecology, persistence, and transfer requires further investigation. Plasmid communities warrant exploration across biomes, as many non-resistant plasmids escape elimination by co-existing with AMR plasmids in the same bacterial host, representing a previously unrecognised survival strategy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".