Bacterial drug resistance is a significant food safety problem and public health threat. Plasmids carrying drug resistance genes may result in the rapid spread of resistance among different bacteria, hosts, and environments; therefore, antibiotic resistance monitoring and continuing research into the mechanisms of drug resistance are urgently needed. Southern blotting with probes for antibiotic resistance genes and even next-generation sequencing have been used previously to detect plasmid-borne resistance genes, but these approaches are complex and time-consuming. The next-generation sequencing requires strict laboratory conditions and bioinformatics analysis ability. In this study, we developed a simplified and sensitive method to detect plasmid-borne antimicrobial resistance genes and plasmid replicon types. Salmonella strains carrying plasmids of three different replicon types that contained mcr-1 and two ESBL-producing genes were used to verify the new method. The plasmids harbored by the Salmonella strains were separated by S1 nuclease treatment and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), then recovered and used as the templates for droplet digital polymerase chain reaction (ddPCR) to identify target genes. The target genes were present in significantly higher copy numbers on the plasmids than the background noise. These results were consistent with the plasmid sequencing results. This S1-PFGE-ddPCR method was less time-consuming to perform than Southern blot and complete plasmid sequencing. Therefore, this method represents a time-saving alternative for detecting plasmid-borne genes, and is likely to be a valuable tool for detecting coexisting plasmid-borne drug resistance genes.
Keywords: ESBL gene; antimicrobial resistant gene; digital PCR; mcr-1; plasmid; replicon type.