Profile of Bacterial Community and Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Typical Vegetable Greenhouse Soil

Abstract

The use of vegetable greenhouse production systems has increased rapidly because of the increasing demand for food materials. The vegetable greenhouse production industry is confronted with serious environmental problems, due to their high agrochemical inputs and intensive utilization. Besides this, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, carrying antibiotic-resistance genes (ARGs), may enter into a vegetable greenhouse with the application of animal manure. Bacterial communities and ARGs were investigated in two typical vegetable-greenhouse-using counties with long histories of vegetable cultivation. The results showed that Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Acidobacteria, Chloroflexi, and Gemmatimonadetes were the dominant phyla, while aadA, tetL, sul1, and sul2 were the most common ARGs in greenhouse vegetable soil. Heatmap and principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) demonstrated that the differences between two counties were more significant than those among soils with different cultivation histories in the same county, suggesting that more effects on bacterial communities and ARGs were caused by soil type and manure type than by the accumulation of cultivation years. The positive correlation between the abundance of the intI gene with specific ARGs highlights the horizontal transfer potential of these ARGs. A total of 11 phyla were identified as the potential hosts of specific ARGs. Based on redundancy analysis (RDA), Ni and pH were the most potent factors determining the bacterial communities, and Cr was the top factor affecting the relative abundance of the ARGs. These results might be helpful in drawing more attention to the risk of manure recycling in the vegetable greenhouse, and further developing a strategy for practical manure application and sustainable production of vegetable greenhouses.

From Sewage Sludge to the Soil—Transfer of Pharmaceuticals: A Review

“…Some of the antibiotics we use end up in sewage sludge, together with a variety of antibiotic resistant bacteria present in feces [ 87 , 88 ]. Therefore, there is a widespread concern that spreading sludge on farmland would contribute to the development or spread of antibiotic resistance [ 89 , 90 ]. Antibiotics can accumulate in food webs and, even more alarmingly, antibiotic resistance genes can be transferred between environmental bacteria and human pathogens [ 91 ].…”