A review of the influence of treatment strategies on antibiotic resistant bacteria and antibiotic resistance genes

Occurrence and ecological hazard assessment of selected antibiotics in the surface waters in and around Lake Honghu, China

“…The resistance genes of these selected bacteria in nature waters could transfer to the terrestrial bacteria and human pathogens by Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) in the complicated biosphere (Cabello et al, 2013). As a result of HGT, these new genetic entities may be incorporated into the pangenome of terrestrial bacteria including human pathogens, linking aquatic and terrestrial resistomes and complicating the treatment of human infections (Cabello et al, 2013;Wellington et al, 2013;Sharma et al, 2016). In addition, aquatic products for human consumption can become contaminated with antibiotics residues.…”

“…Numerous studies have reported the concentrations of antibiotics ranged from several ng per liter to hundreds of μg per liter in various environmental compartments, such as hospital sewage, municipal sewage, surface waters, groundwater, and seawater (Brown et al, 2006;Kümmerer, 2009;Chang et al, 2010;Rodriguez-Mozaz et al, 2015;Yao et al, 2015Yao et al, , 2017Chen et al, 2015a, b;Ngumba et al, 2016;Sui et al, 2017). The antibiotic burden in water can result in direct toxicity to animals (Wollenberger et al, 2000;Wang et al, 2014;Yan et al, 2016) and plants (Migliore et al, 2003;Pan and Chu, 2016), but more importantly, they can induce antibiotic-resistant bacteria or genes, which increase health and ecological hazards through food chains, even at low concentrations (Wellington et al, 2013;Ye et al, 2016;Sharma et al, 2016).…”

The occurrence of antibiotic resistance genes in tap water – a review

“…Nowadays, due to the high availability of antibiotics, the overuse of drugs is inevitable both in developed and developing countries. The increasing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) is the obvious result of the situation [5][6][7][8][9][10]. As the prokaryotic genomes could be regarded as the molecules of high plasticity, their rapid adaptation to the new environmental conditions, i.e.…”

“…As the prokaryotic genomes could be regarded as the molecules of high plasticity, their rapid adaptation to the new environmental conditions, i.e. presence of antibiotic agents, is expected [6,9]. This phenomenon is explained, among others, by the association of class 1 integrons to gene cassettes containing antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs).…”

“…Moreover, disinfection processes could cause the lysis of bacterial cells in some circumstances, leading to the release of free DNA molecules, which could contain the ARGs [9]. Drinking water treatment plants with biological activated carbon [18] or biological treatment tanks [19] may even increase normalized copy numbers of ARGs.…”