Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 330 North Orchard Street, Madison, WI, 53715, USA; Centre for Antibiotic Resistance Research (CARe) at University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden; Department of Infectious Diseases, Institute of Biomedicine, The Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Guldhedsgatan 10, SE-413 46, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Division for Marine and Environmental Research, Rudjer Boskovic Institute, Bijenicka cesta 54, 10000, Zagreb, Croatia.
Water Res. 2019 Oct 1;162:437-445. doi: 10.1016/j.watres.2019.06.073. Epub 2019 Jul 4.
Antibiotic resistance is an emerging global health crisis, driven largely by overuse and misuse of antibiotics. However, there are examples in which the production of these antimicrobial agents has polluted the environment with active antibiotic residues, selecting for antibiotic resistant bacteria and the genes they carry. In this work, we have used shotgun metagenomics to investigate the taxonomic structure and resistance gene composition of sludge communities in a treatment plant in Croatia receiving wastewater from production of the macrolide antibiotic azithromycin. We found that the total abundance of antibiotic resistance genes was three times higher in sludge from the treatment plant receiving wastewater from pharmaceutical production than in municipal sludge from a sewage treatment plant in Zagreb. Surprisingly, macrolide resistance genes did not have higher abundances in the industrial sludge, but genes associated with mobile genetic elements such as integrons had. We conclude that at high concentrations of antibiotics, selection may favor taxonomic shifts towards intrinsically resistant species or strains harboring chromosomal resistance mutations rather than acquisition of mobile resistance determinants. Our results underscore the need for regulatory action also within Europe to avoid release of antibiotics into the environment.
抗生素耐药性是一个新出现的全球健康危机，主要是由于抗生素的过度使用和滥用。然而，也有一些例子表明，这些抗菌剂的生产已经用活性抗生素残留污染了环境，从而选择了具有抗生素耐药性的细菌及其携带的基因。在这项工作中，我们使用鸟枪法宏基因组学来研究克罗地亚一家处理厂的污泥群落的分类结构和耐药基因组成，该处理厂接收生产大环内酯类抗生素阿奇霉素的废水。我们发现，接收来自制药生产废水的处理厂的污泥中抗生素耐药基因的总丰度比来自萨格勒布污水处理厂的城市污泥高三倍。令人惊讶的是，工业污泥中并没有更高丰度的大环内酯类耐药基因，而是与整合子等可移动遗传元件相关的基因丰度更高。我们得出结论，在高浓度抗生素的情况下，选择可能有利于朝着具有内在耐药性的物种或携带染色体耐药突变的菌株发生分类转变，而不是获得可移动的耐药决定因素。我们的研究结果强调了欧洲也需要采取监管行动，以避免将抗生素释放到环境中。
