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Management of Microbial Resources in the Environment pp 215–247Cite as

Conjugative Plasmids in Anthropogenic Soils

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Abstract

Horizontal transfer of mobile genetic elements such as plasmids and bacteriophages and their associated hitchhiking elements such as transposons, integrative and conjugative elements and insertion sequences shapes bacterial chromosomes and enables their adaptation to changing environmental conditions. In soils, a diversity of conjugative plasmids involved in microbial metabolism, coping with stress factors or providing their carriers with traits outcompeting competitors in the ecological niche have been detected by classical and molecular techniques. The rhizosphere displays a hot spot for conjugative plasmid transfer in soil. Plasmid transfer has been studied in a variety of soil habitats from pristine to heavily polluted soils, such as heavy metal and radionuclide contaminated ones. In all of these environments, plasmid transfer has been demonstrated to contribute to the spread of genes that provide their recipients with ecological traits conferring adaptation to contaminant stress, to cope with the presence of toxic pharmaceuticals (e.g. antibiotics) or enable them to degrade xenobiotic compounds. Transconjugants harbouring the traits acquired by horizontal transfer were shown to survive in soil and to spread the acquired beneficial factors to both indigenous related and phylogenetically distant microorganisms. PCR screens have been developed to detect conjugative plasmids of different incompatibility groups and virulence/pathogenicity-encoded traits in a rapid, reliable and sensible way. This chapter summarizes the state of the art of mobile genetic elements and their transmission in soils.

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Acknowledgements

I sincerely thank Miquel Salgot and Jacques Mahillon for critical reading of the manuscript. I regret that not all valuable contributions of colleagues in the field could have been included in this chapter due to space limitation.

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  1. Division of Infectious Diseases, University Medical Centre Freiburg, Hugstetter Strasse 55, 79106, Freiburg, Germany

    Elisabeth Grohmann

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  1. Elisabeth Grohmann
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Correspondence to Elisabeth Grohmann .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural Microbiology Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India

    Abdul Malik (Visiting Professor/Scientist) (Visiting Professor/Scientist)

  2. Division of Infectious Diseases, University Medical Center Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Abdul Malik (Visiting Professor/Scientist) & Elisabeth Grohmann (Visiting Professor/Scientist) & 

  3. Center of Biological Engineering, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Madalena Alves

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Grohmann, E. (2013). Conjugative Plasmids in Anthropogenic Soils. In: Malik, A., Grohmann, E., Alves, M. (eds) Management of Microbial Resources in the Environment. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5931-2_9

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