الفهرس 
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Abstract
Non- tuberculous Mycobacteria (NTM) are natural inhabitant in soil, water and dust.It was found that NTM were present with high incidence rate in the developing countries like United States and Europe where the incidence of tuberculosis is low.NTM causes many diseases for both humans and animals so it become of great interest.Also, it was very difficult in the treatment so the aim of this study was to shows the importance of conjugation in M. avium for exchange virulence and resistance genes The used plasmid was according to (Ummels et al., 2013) is called pRAW plasmid and this plasmid was detected in M. marinum and according to this paper they said that this plasmid is able to be transfer to only slow growing mycobacterium as mycobacterium tuberculosis and for M. avium they found some difficulties and cannot able to transfer to fast growing mycobacterium by conjugation.But in this research, I use this plasmid and I try to transfer it to about 72 strains isolated from animals, environment and patients.The obtained results showed that the conjugation occur with high efficiency in the animal isolates followed by environmental isolates and then the patient isolates and for conformation we run PCR by using three different primers (VirB4 and SopA specific for pRAW plasmid and NTM 16S nested specific for M. avium) and also, we do plasmid visualization for more conformation and we see the plasmid in some of the transconjugant isolates. And to know why conjugation occur with high frequency in animal and environmental isolates comparison to human isolates we do some bioinformatic which confirms higher abundance of plasmid-related genes in environmental isolates versus clinical and animal isolates. Moreover, there were not any plasmid-derived genes present or absent specifically in the group of strains exhibiting conjugative recipient activity. And also, we make analysis to some conjugative plasmids like pMA100 and pMAH135 and also, we found higher abundance of plasmid-related genes in environmental isolates versus clinical and animal isolates that may answer our question. The extraction of genes specific for the group of conjugating versus non-conjugating strains was achieved by comparing the gene annotations in the two groups followed by statistical correlation tests. And from this analysis we found one gene called RadC which not present in any annotated transconjugant group and for more confirmation we do more analysis to this gene and we found that none of the conjugating isolates contained both, a full-length radC together with a complete type I restriction/modification system.To assess the impact of conjugative uptake of pRAW plasmid on the antimicrobial resistance, MIC for 13 antibiotics of three isolates (one environmental, one animal and one clinical isolates) with sensititer system was measured and the results indicated that pRAW does not transfer antibiotic resistance genes but in fact seems to increase sensitivity for some antibiotics.To know the effect of uptake of pRAW plasmid on the metabolism, one transconjugant isolate was examined by Biolog Phenotypic MicroArray and the results showed that the transconjugant isolates metabolize more sulfur substrate in comparison to the recipient.To investigate the effect of pRAW plasmid on the virulence, the infection test of monocyte which isolates from the blood of human was performed and the results confirmed that up-taking of the plasmid lead to decrease the virulence of the strain.