MoS Decorated Nanocomposite: FeO@MoS Inhibits the Conjugative Transfer of Antibiotic Resistance Genes

Nanomaterials of AlO and TiO have been proved to promote the spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) by horizontal gene transfer. In this work, we found that FeO@MoS nanocomposite inhibited the horizontal gene transfer (HGT) by inhibiting the conjugative transfer mediated by RP4-7 plasmid. To discover the mechanism of FeO@MoS inhibiting HGT, the bacterial cells were collected under the optimal mating conditions. The collected bacterial cells were used for analyzing the expression levels of genes unique to the plasmid and the bacterial chromosome in the conjugation system by qPCR. The results of genes expression demonstrated that the mechanism of FeO@MoS inhibited conjugation by promoting the expression of global regulatory gene (trbA) and inhibiting the expression of conjugative transfer genes involved in mating pair formation (traF, trbB) and DNA replication (trfA). The risk assessment of FeO@MoS showed that it had very low toxicity to organisms. The findings of this paper showed that FeO@MoS, as an inhibitor of horizontal gene transfer, is an environment-friendly material.