CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Plasmids are present in all branches of the bacterial tree of life and have been found in all bacterial communities studied to date. However, only a limited amount of plasmid sequences data are currently available (1). The degree of gene diversity within the mobile gene pool or ?mobilome? (2) and their functions, compared with the essential genes presents in bacterial chromosomes, has encouraged the speculation that plasmids represent a different genetic source. With the aim of investigating the plasmid content of Acinetobacter spp., 64 isolates were analyzed in their plasmid content to perform a deep sequencing of the plasmid found. The analysis showed that 89% of the isolates bear at least one plasmid. After purifying a pool containing all the plasmids, the DNA was sequence by Illumina MiSeq in a 2x 250 paired-end run. 1,419,341 reads were obtained, covering a total of 347,374,930 bp, reaching a value of coverage of approximately 650. 19 close circular plasmids could be assembled, that correspond for more than 300 Kb in total. The sizes of the plasmids and the GC content were very variable, ranging between 1.9 to 62 kb and 33% to 61%, respectively. The annotation was done automatically via the GenDB pipeline available at the CeBiTec (Uni-Bielefeld, Germany) and RAST (http://rast.nmpdr.org/). Genes of interest, as identified from the sequencing and bioinformatics analysis, are physically available in the conserved plasmid collection and can be recovered for activity evaluation. The wide distribution of different types of plasmids found (evaluated at this time by the replication initiator proteins) in Acinetobacter spp plasmid collection makes the functional and phenotypic study of plasmids a relevant focus of analysis to understand the mechanisms of adaptation, and genomes plasticity of microorganisms.