Antibiotic resistance genes in an urban river as impacted by bacterial community and physicochemical parameters

Abstract

Antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in urban rivers are a serious public health concern in regions with poorly planned, rapid development. To gain insights into the predominant factors affecting the fate of ARGs in a highly polluted urban river in eastern China, a total of 285 ARGs, microbial communities, and 20 physicochemical parameters were analyzed for 17 sites. A total of 258 unique ARGs were detected using high-throughput qPCR, and the absolute abundance of total ARGs was positively correlated with total organic carbon and total dissolved nitrogen concentrations (P < 0.01). ARG abundance and diversity were greatly altered by microbial community structure. Variation partitioning analysis showed that the combined effects of multiple factors contributed to the profile and dissemination of ARGs, and variation of microbial communities was the major factor affecting the distribution of ARGs. The disparate distribution of some bacteria, including Bacteroides from mammalian gastrointestinal flora, Burkholderia from zoonotic infectious diseases, and Zoogloea from wastewater treatment, indicates that the urban river was strongly influenced by point-source pollution. Results imply that microbial community shifts caused by changes in water quality may lead to the spread of ARGs, and point-source pollution in urban rivers requires greater attention to control the transfer of ARGs between environmental bacteria and pathogens.

Antibiotics and antibiotic resistance genes in global lakes: A review and meta-analysis

“…Among the studies that assessed lakes, 14 used qPCR and 3 used metagenomics. HT-PCR has been used for ARG analysis of samples from swine farms (Zhu et al 2013), rivers (Ouyang et al 2015;Zheng et al 2017;Zhou et al 2017), and drinking water treatment plants (Xu et al 2016).…”

“…Michigan (Chu et al 2017) and antibiotic pollution in Kazipally Lake (Bengtsson-Palme et al 2014). The bacterial community was identified as a contributing factor driving ARG composition other than mobile genetic elements (MGEs) in Tiaoxi River (Zheng et al 2017) and Wen-Rui Tang River (Zhou et al 2017).…”

Antibiotic-resistance of Fecal Coliforms at the Bottom of the Tama River, Tokyo

“…A wide range of the bacterial diversity including antibiotic-resistant bacteria and genes in urban rivers has been investigated Narcisoda- Rocha and Manaia, 2016;Proia et al, 2018 . It was suggested that bacterial communities shift due to changes in water quality, affecting the abundance and diversity of antibiotic-resistant genes Zhou et al, 2017 . Fecal coliforms are generally used as an indicator of bacteriological water quality for drinking. An increase in the number of antibiotic-resistant fecal coliforms in a river changes the ratio of gut flora, and this change leads to the majority of resistant strains in the gut, resulting in a serious public health issue.…”

Antibiotic resistance associated with air quality and transferred by airborne particulate matter

“…Antibiotic resistance is a serious threat to public health [1]. Diverse and abundant antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) are widespread in most environments (e.g., air, water, soil, remote and pristine glacier and caves, urban sewage, and drinking water) [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a major driver for disseminating ARGs within and across bacterial genera, via mobile genetic elements (MGEs), such as plasmids, integrons, transposes, and prophages [12].…”

“…For this, 285 antibiotic resistance gene primer sets for all major classes of antibiotics, 9 transposase gene primer sets, one clinical class 1 integron-integrase gene primer set, and one 16S rRNA gene primer set were evaluated (Table S1) [6,26]. The antibiotics resistance genes to aminoglycoside, betalactams, fluoroquinolone/quinolone/florfenicol/chloramphenicol/amphenicol (FCA), macrolide/lincosamide/streptogramin B (MLSB), sulfonamide, and tetracycline, vancomycin, and genes coding multidrug efflux pumps or antibiotic deactivation protein resistance to other antibiotic 6 and bactericide (multidrug) resistance genes were targeted by the 285 ARGs primer sets [5,27] (detailed HT-qPCR procedures are described in Supplementary Information Text S2).…”