The ever-increasing magnitude of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) encountered in human pathogens is a huge concern for public health worldwide, limiting treatment options for bacterial infections and thereby reducing clinical efficacy while increasing treatment costs and mortality. With a lack of development of new antibiotics, and increasing resistance even to last-resort antibiotics (Nordmann et al., 2012), there is a need to conserve the ones available.

In an environment, for a pathogenic bacterium to get an antibiotic resistance genes from the existing environmental gene pool, it need to be transferred via one of the three processes of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) methods such as conjugation, transformation, and transduction.

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