Hurdles to horizontal gene transfer: species-specific effects of synonymous variation and plasmid copy number determine antibiotic resistance phenotype.

Could codon composition condition the immediate success and the orientation of horizontal gene transfer? Horizontal gene transfer represents a change in the genome of expression of the transferred gene, and experimental evidence has accumulated indicating that the codon composition of a sequence is an important determinant of its compatibility with the translation machinery of the genome in which it is expressed. This suggests that codon composition influences the phenotype and the fitness conferred by a transferred gene and thus the immediate success of the transfer. To directly test this hypothesis, we characterized the resistance conferred by synonymous variants of a gentamicin resistance gene in three bacterial species: Escherichia coli, Acinetobacter baylyi and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The strongest determinant of the resistance level conferred was the species in which the resistance gene was transferred, very likely because of important differences in the copy number of the plasmid carrying the gene. Significant differences in resistance were also found between synonymous variants within each of the three species, but more importantly, there was a strong interaction between species and variant: variants conferring high resistance in one species confer low resistance in another. However, the similarity in codon usage between the synonymous variants and the host genome only explained part of the phenotypic differences between variants in one species, P. aeruginosa. Further investigation of alternative explanations did not reveal common universal mechanisms across our three bacterial species. We conclude that codon composition can be a determinant of post-horizontal gene transfer success. However, there are multiple paths leading from synonymous sequence to phenotype, and sensitivity to these different paths is species-specific.