Biology subjects

Escobar-Zepeda, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Escobar-Zepeda, A..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

MAP: a comprehensive pipeline for mobilome annotation and cargo gene characterisation in prokaryotic (meta)genomic assemblies

Mobile genetic elements (MGEs) drive horizontal gene transfer in prokaryotes, disseminating antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs), virulence factors (VFs) and biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Given their importance, there is a pressing need for a single, open source tool that annotates the MGE repertoire together with its functional cargo. We present MAP (Mobilome Annotation Pipeline), a Nextflow pipeline that predicts plasmids, viral sequences, prophages, integrons, insertion sequences, transposons, integrative and conjugative elements, and non-autonomous compositional outliers, removes redundant predictions, and labels genes within MGE boundaries. MAP outputs a GFF3 formatted file, a FASTA file of MGE sequences, and a combined report placing ARGs, VFs, toxins and BGCs in their mobilome context, enabling the identification of composite elements such as ARG-carrying integrons within plasmids. We demonstrate its use on genomes from the MGnify soil genome catalogue.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2025

Biome-specific genome catalogues reveal functional potential of shallow sequencing

The use of 16S rRNA metabarcoding for functional prediction is limited by several biases. Shallow shotgun sequencing is a cost-effective and taxonomically high-resolution alternative to 16S rRNA metabarcoding, but the low sequencing depth limits functional inference. Our BioSIFTR tool maps shallow shotgun sequencing reads against single-biome databases and extrapolates into their precalculated functional profiles. We used three datasets from red junglefowl, mice, and human gut, containing matched deep shotgun metagenomic and 16S rRNA metabarcoding data for taxonomic and functional benchmarking. An additional human gut deep shotgun sequencing data set was subsampled to 1 M reads and analysed with BioSIFTR to replicate previously obtained results. BioSIFTR taxonomic and functional profiles closely agree with the results of the full deep sequencing data in all biomes. We also replicated differences in the human gut microbiome between high and low trimethylamine N-oxide producing participants, using only < 2 % of the original deep sequencing data. The BioSIFTR tool is a powerful approach which approximates the functional information of a deep-sequenced metagenome while using only a fraction of the data. Shallow shotgun sequencing combined with BioSIFTR could be a stand-in replacement for 16S rRNA metabarcoding with an increased taxonomic and functional resolution, and lower bias. Graphical abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=87 SRC="FIGDIR/small/659887v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (20K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@8ca365org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@13b466dorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@8cad19org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1b853fa_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2022

In vitro demonstration of broad host range mobile genetic elements transferring antibiotic resistance from the human microbiome

Mobile genetic elements (MGEs) carrying antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) disseminate ARGs when they mobilise into new bacterial hosts. To investigate the scale of such horizontal gene transfer (HGT) events between human gut commensals and enteropathogens for the first time, we compared 1354 cultured commensal strains (540 species) to 45,403 enteropathogen strains (12 species) and found 64,188 MGE-mediated ARG transfer events between the two groups using established methods. Among the 5931 MGEs involved, we found 15 broad host range elements predicted to have crossed different bacterial phyla while also occurring in animal and environmental microbiomes. We experimentally demonstrated that predicted broad host range MGEs can mobilise from commensals Dorea longicatena and Hungatella hathewayi to enteropathogens Klebsiella oxytoca, crossing phyla simultaneously. Our work establishes the MGE-mediated ARG dissemination network between human gut commensals and enteropathogens and highlights novel broad host range MGEs as targets for future ARG dissemination management.

genomics↗