Fig. 5

Horizontal transfer of ARG clusters conferring resistance to four antibiotics across diverse plasmid backgrounds (85 in total) and ecological barriers. Hierarchical clustering of plasmids (WWTPs: 39; public: 46) is performed using the binary presence and absence of accessory genes. Colored nodes indicate the isolation source of the plasmids. The conjugative plasmids are depicted by different colored asterisks, as per the inset color key. The presence of ARGs, conjugative elements, and plasmid replicon genes are plotted as a binary heatmap, and different ARG clusters identified across the plasmid data set are shown to the right as the colored nodes, with lines indicating the potential transfer of the corresponding ARG clusters