Magnúsdóttir Stefanía, Saraiva Joao Pedro, Bartholomäus Alexander, Soheili Majid, Toscan Rodolfo Brizola, Zhang Junya, Nunes da Rocha Ulisses
Department of Environmental Microbiology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ, Leipzig, Germany.
GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Section Geomicrobiology, Potsdam, Germany.
Front Microbiol. 2023 Jan 25;14:1037845. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2023.1037845. eCollection 2023.
Every year, millions of deaths are associated with the increased spread of antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) in bacteria. With the increasing urbanization of the global population, the spread of ARGs in urban bacteria has become a more severe threat to human health.
In this study, we used metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) recovered from 1,153 urban metagenomes in multiple urban locations to investigate the fate and occurrence of ARGs in urban bacteria. Additionally, we analyzed the occurrence of these ARGs on plasmids and estimated the virulence of the bacterial species.
Our results showed that multidrug and glycopeptide ARGs are ubiquitous among urban bacteria. Additionally, we analyzed the deterministic effects of phylogeny on the spread of these ARGs and found ARG classes that have a non-random distribution within the phylogeny of our recovered MAGs. However, few ARGs were found on plasmids and most of the recovered MAGs contained few virulence factors.
Our results suggest that the observed non-random spreads of ARGs are not due to the transfer of plasmids and that most of the bacteria observed in the study are unlikely to be virulent. Additional research is needed to evaluate whether the ubiquitous and widespread ARG classes will become entirely prevalent among urban bacteria and how they spread among phylogenetically distinct species.
每年，数百万的死亡与细菌中抗微生物耐药基因（ARGs）传播的增加有关。随着全球人口城市化程度的不断提高，ARGs在城市细菌中的传播已对人类健康构成更严重的威胁。
在本研究中，我们使用从多个城市地点的1153个城市宏基因组中回收的宏基因组组装基因组（MAGs）来研究城市细菌中ARGs的归宿和出现情况。此外，我们分析了这些ARGs在质粒上的出现情况，并估计了细菌物种的毒力。
我们的结果表明，多药和糖肽ARGs在城市细菌中普遍存在。此外，我们分析了系统发育对这些ARGs传播的决定性影响，发现了在我们回收的MAGs系统发育中具有非随机分布的ARG类别。然而，在质粒上发现的ARGs很少，并且大多数回收的MAGs含有很少的毒力因子。
我们的结果表明，观察到的ARGs非随机传播并非由于质粒转移，并且该研究中观察到的大多数细菌不太可能具有毒性。需要进一步的研究来评估普遍存在且广泛传播的ARG类别是否会在城市细菌中完全流行，以及它们如何在系统发育不同的物种之间传播。
