Horizontal Gene Transfer: Generating Antibiotic-resistant Bacteria

Abstract

This study aims to understand the gene mobility and its benefits. In this experiment, we transferred the significant gene horizontally under the appropriate condition and generated an antibiotic-resistant bacterial strain. The process of gene mobility is known as horizontal gene transfer, in which three different modes have been acknowledged that are transduction, transformation, and conjugation. Conjugation is a simple natural occurrence of cell-to-cell contact for transferring gene. The gene sequence that was analyzed in this study is responsible for tetracycline resistance in Proteus mirabilis; the gene was transferred horizontally to Klebsiella pneumoniae. Two methods were used for the conjugation, namely, plate- and broth-mating. The conjugation results were analyzed statistically, where events of probability across the time intervals at the highest spectrophotometric absorbance of 0.43 are tabulated. Broth mating was performed in 25 samples and the probability of an event is successful at P = 0.88. Further, broth mating was accredited to be better than plate-mating as claimed with a 95% confidence interval that yields the value of Z normal test of 4.49. This study suggests a feasible method for generating drug-resistant bacterial strains for use in medical research and industrial applications.