Plants mine the soil to obtain essential nutrients and in so doing, they can take-up several antibiotics produced in the soil by some microorganisms. One such antibiotic is kanamycin. Plants are sensitive to antibiotics therefore appear to have developed different mechanisms of resistance. For example, Arabidopsis plants possess the Atwbc19 gene that confers kanamycin resistance. Arabidopsis plants exposed to kanamycin are known to reduce their iron uptake which might allow them to exhibit resistance. In addition, when citrate is present in the media, iron uptake is drastically reduced. Here, we propose a model that accounts for the relationships between kanamycin, the Atwbc19 gene, citrate and metal uptake. Experimental data was generated to examine the effect of kanamycin on metal uptake in the presence or absence of the citrate. After 7, 10, 13 days of germination, the plants were harvested images captured, dried samples were weighed and sent for metal analysis. As expected, the results confirmed iron uptake deficiency in mutant plants exposed to kanamycin when grown on media with citrate. Our model was built in VCell and simulations and experimental results were compared. This data corroborated the proposed model and allowed us to understand how metal uptake and antibiotic resistance are connected.
