Future Challenges to Protecting Public Health from Drinking-Water Contaminants

Murphy, Eileen A.; Post, Gloria B.; Buckley, Brian; Lippincott, R. Lee; Robson, Mark G.

doi:10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031811-124506

Cited by 31 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Nowadays, antibiotic use, environmental temperature and urban wastewater treatment plants size have been realised as important factors related to resistance persistence and spread in the environment [33,34]. However, this study is the first to find that chlorine disinfection, which has been used to eliminate pathogens and improve public health in past years [35], increased the frequency of natural transformation and inevitably promoted the horizontal transfer of ARG across bacterial genera via culturable chlorine-injured bacteria. In a sense, chlorine disinfection naturally accelerated the genetic exchange in or across bacterial genera, resulting in the enrichment of ARGs in bacteria after chlorination.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Chlorine disinfection promotes the exchange of antibiotic resistance genes across bacterial genera by natural transformation

Jin¹,

Liu²,

Da-ning³

et al. 2020

The ISME Journal

272

102

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Chlorine disinfection to drinking water plays an important role in preventing and controlling waterborne disease outbreaks globally. Nevertheless, little is known about why it enriches the antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in bacteria after chlorination. Here, ARGs released from killed antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB), and culturable chlorine-injured bacteria produced in the chlorination process as the recipient, were investigated to determine their contribution to the horizontal transfer of ARGs during disinfection treatment. We discovered Escherichia coli, Salmonella aberdeen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterococcus faecalis showed diverse resistance to sodium hypochlorite, and transferable RP4 could be released from killed sensitive donor consistently. Meanwhile, the survival of chlorine-tolerant injured bacteria with enhanced cell membrane permeabilisation and a strong oxidative stress-response demonstrated that a physiologically competent cell could be transferred by RP4 with an improved transformation frequency of up to 550 times compared with the corresponding untreated bacteria. Furthermore, the water quality factors involving chemical oxygen demand (COD Mn), ammonium nitrogen and metal ions (Ca 2+ and K +) could significantly promote above transformation frequency of released RP4 into injured E. faecalis. Our findings demonstrated that the chlorination process promoted the horizontal transfer of plasmids by natural transformation, which resulted in the exchange of ARGs across bacterial genera and the emergence of new ARB, as well as the transfer of chlorine-injured opportunistic pathogen from non-ARB to ARB. Considering that the transfer elements were quite resistant to degradation through disinfection, this situation poses a potential risk to public health.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Chlorine disinfection promotes the exchange of antibiotic resistance genes across bacterial genera by natural transformation

Jin¹,

Liu²,

Da-ning³

et al. 2020

The ISME Journal

272

102

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“…For example, a dramatic decline in wildlife populations in the Indian subcontinent caused by emerging contaminants has been reported in the literature . These observations are increasing concern over potential human exposure and resulting impacts on public health . Epidemiological studies suggest that significant impacts on human development can already be detected .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optical bioassay for measuring sublethal toxicity of insecticides in Daphnia pulex

Zein

McElmurry

Kashian

et al. 2013

Enviro Toxic and Chemistry

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Many emerging contaminants tend to be biologically active at very low concentrations, occur in water as part of complex mixtures, and impact biota in ways that are not detected using traditional toxicity tests (e.g., median lethal concentration). To evaluate emerging contaminants, the authors developed a method for detecting sublethal behavioral effects by quantifying the swimming behavior of Daphnia pulex, a model organism for studying aquatic toxicity. This optical tracking technique is capable of measuring many swimming parameters, 2 of which-cumulative distance and angular change-are presented. To validate this technique, 2 prototypical compounds that exhibit different modes of action as well as corresponding insecticides that are commonly found in surface waters were investigated. The acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitor physostigmine was used as the prototypical compound for the large number of AChE inhibitor insecticides (e.g., chlorpyrifos). Nicotine was used as the prototypical compound for neonicotinoid insecticides (e.g., imidacloprid). Results demonstrate that this assay is capable of detecting sublethal behavioral effects that are concentration-dependent and that insecticides with the same mode of action yield similar results. The method can easily be scaled up to serve as a high-throughput screening tool to detect sublethal toxic effects of a variety of chemicals. This method is likely to aid in enhancing the current understanding of emerging contaminants and to serve as a novel water-quality screening tool.

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“…4,[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] However, application of HTS approaches to toxicity screening continues to face significant research challenges, not least of which is developing the means to manage, process and extract insights from the large, complex datasets being produced. 4,[16][17][18][19] In addition, there is growing recognition that the challenge of reliably predicting downstream biological responses of toxicological relevance will require integration of many different types of data, knowledge, and informational resources.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

ToxCast Chemical Landscape: Paving the Road to 21st Century Toxicology

Richard

Judson

Houck

et al. 2016

Chem. Res. Toxicol.

519

392

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) ToxCast program is testing a large library of Agency-relevant chemicals using in vitro high-throughput screening (HTS) approaches to support the development of improved toxicity prediction models. Launched in 2007, Phase I of the program screened 310 chemicals, mostly pesticides, across hundreds of ToxCast assay end points. In Phase II, the ToxCast library was expanded to 1878 chemicals, culminating in the public release of screening data at the end of 2013. Subsequent expansion in Phase III has resulted in more than 3800 chemicals actively undergoing ToxCast screening, 96% of which are also being screened in the multi-Agency Tox21 project. The chemical library unpinning these efforts plays a central role in defining the scope and potential application of ToxCast HTS results. The history of the phased construction of EPA's ToxCast library is reviewed, followed by a survey of the library contents from several different vantage points. CAS Registry Numbers are used to assess ToxCast library coverage of important toxicity, regulatory, and exposure inventories. Structure-based representations of ToxCast chemicals are then used to compute physicochemical properties, substructural features, and structural alerts for toxicity and biotransformation. Cheminformatics approaches using these varied representations are applied to defining the boundaries of HTS testability, evaluating chemical diversity, and comparing the ToxCast library to potential target application inventories, such as used in EPA's Endocrine Disruption Screening Program (EDSP). Through several examples, the ToxCast chemical library is demonstrated to provide comprehensive coverage of the knowledge domains and target inventories of potential interest to EPA. Furthermore, the varied representations and approaches presented here define local chemistry domains potentially worthy of further investigation (e.g., not currently covered in the testing library or defined by toxicity "alerts") to strategically support data mining and predictive toxicology modeling moving forward.

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Future Challenges to Protecting Public Health from Drinking-Water Contaminants

Cited by 31 publications

References 41 publications

Chlorine disinfection promotes the exchange of antibiotic resistance genes across bacterial genera by natural transformation

Chlorine disinfection promotes the exchange of antibiotic resistance genes across bacterial genera by natural transformation

Optical bioassay for measuring sublethal toxicity of insecticides in Daphnia pulex

ToxCast Chemical Landscape: Paving the Road to 21st Century Toxicology

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