High genomic diversity of multi-drug resistant wastewater Escherichia coli

Abstract

19Wastewater treatment plants play an important role in the release of antibiotic resistance into the 20 environment. It has been shown that wastewater contains multi-drug resistant Escherichia coli, 21 but information on strain diversity is surprisingly scarce. Here we present an exceptionally large 22 dataset on multidrug resistant Escherichia coli, originating from wastewater, over a thousand 23 isolates were phenotypically characterized for twenty antibiotics and for 103 isolates whole 24 genomes were sequenced. To our knowledge this is the first study documenting such a 25 comprehensive diversity of multi-drug resistant Escherichia coli in wastewater. The genomic 26 diversity of the isolates was unexpectedly high and contained a high number of resistance and 27 virulence genes. To illustrate the genomic diversity of the isolates we calculated the pan genome 28 of the wastewater Escherichia coli and found it to contain over sixteen thousand genes. To 29 analyse this diverse dataset, we devised a computational approach correlating genotypic variation 30 and resistance phenotype, this way we were able to identify not only known, but also candidate 31 resistance genes. Finally, we could verify that the effluent of a wastewater treatment plant will 32

Self-Driven Pretreatment and Room-Temperature Storage of Water Samples for Virus Detection Using Enhanced Porous Superabsorbent Polymer (PSAP) Beads

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Genome sequencing as a new window into the microbial community of membrane bioreactors – A critical review

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The level of antimicrobial resistance of sewage isolates is higher than that of river isolates in different Escherichia coli lineages

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