Genes
Anticipating the Next Recorded Bacterial Hosts of Plasmid-Borne Antimicrobial Resistance Genes: A Temporal Graph Analysis of Plasmid and Surveillance Data
By Aljohani WA.
Abstract
Background/objectives
Plasmid-mediated dissemination of antimicrobial resistance genes complicates the control of bacterial infections. Identifying bacterial hosts likely to harbour these genes could guide genomic surveillance before such associations enter public databases. We investigated whether existing plasmid and surveillance data could anticipate which resistance gene-host associations would next be recorded in those databases, and which genomic features inform that prediction.
Methods
We integrated 72,556 complete plasmid records and 2,116,241 surveillance isolates, encompassing 458 resistance gene alleles, 574 replicon backbones and 222 bacterial species. A temporal graph model, MobiGraph, was trained on associations recorded before a fixed cutoff and evaluated on subsequently observed associations, using candidate hosts matched for sequencing effort and phylogenetic distance. Ranking within a candidate pool was the primary outcome; threshold-free summaries are reported as secondary.