A Comprehensive Analysis on Spread and Distribution Characteristic of Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Livestock Farms of Southeastern China

Abstract

The pollution of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in livestock farms is a problem which need to be paid more attention to, due to the severe resistance dissemination and the further human health risk. In this study, all the relevant exposure matrices (manure, soil and water) of sixteen animal farms in Southeastern China were sampled to determine twenty-two ARGs conferring resistance to five major classes of antibiotics including tetracyclines, sulfonamides, quinolones, aminoglycosides, and macrolides. The results showed that the spread property of sul genes was most extensive and strong, followed by tet and erm genes. The abundance of tet genes expressing ribosomal protection proteins (tetM, tetO, tetQ, tetT and tetW) was higher than that expressing efflux pump proteins (tetA, tetC, tetE and tetG) in each type of samples. The high abundance and frequency of ermB gene in the matrices should be paid more attention, because macrolides is a major medicine for human use. For manures, it was found that the similar ARGs distribution rules were existing in poultry manure or porcine manure samples, despite of the different origins of these two types of livestock farms. Meanwhile, it was interesting that the distribution rule of tet genes in animal manure was nearly the same as all the ARGs. For soils, the result of nonmetric multi-dimensional scaling (NMDS) analysis showed that the pollution of ARGs in the soils fertilized by poultry and cattle manures were more substantial in northern Jiangsu, but no significant ARGs diversity was observed among porcine manured soils of five different regions. Furthermore, most ARGs showed significant positive relationships with environmental variables such as concentration of sulfonamides, tetracyclines, Cu, Zn and total organic carbon (TOC). The pollution profile and characteristics of so many ARGs in livestock farms can provide significative foundation for the regulation and legislation of antibiotics in China.

Antimicrobial resistance in clinical Escherichia coli isolates from poultry and livestock, China

“…China is the largest user of antibiotics in the world with 162,000 tons used in 2013 [ 7 ], about 10 times more than used in the USA [ 8 ]. Mostly, these antibiotics are used in the livestock and poultry industries where there are few regulations controlling their use [ 9 ].…”

Prevalence and proliferation of antibiotic resistance genes in the subtropical mangrove wetland ecosystem of South China Sea

“…The metal concentrations in this study are natural background concentrations (Ministry of Ecology & Environment of the People's Republic of China, ). And the concentrations of Cu and Zn are much lower than the samples from livestock farms in the above study (Ji et al, ; Wang et al, ; Zhu et al, ). In our study, sediment TOC was found to negatively correlate to gene rpoB , resistance type aminoglycoside and amount of resistance types (Figure ), and pH was positively correlated to abundance of gene mdtB and ARG diversity, and negatively correlated to abundance of gene arnA .…”

“…In our study, sediment TOC was found to negatively correlate to gene rpoB , resistance type aminoglycoside and amount of resistance types (Figure ), and pH was positively correlated to abundance of gene mdtB and ARG diversity, and negatively correlated to abundance of gene arnA . Correlations between ARGs and pH or TOC in different soil researches are variant (Knapp et al, ; Wang et al, ), it seems that TOC and pH affect ARGs depends on the specific environmental background.…”

Fates of antibiotic resistance genes in a distributed swine wastewater treatment plant

“…Finally, the reduction efficiencies of the treatment plant were 0.1-2.6 log. 3.1 × 10 4 -7.1 × 10 8 copies/L of diverse ARGs persisted, implying that the swine wastewater effluent is an important source discharging antibiotic resistance of the environment, as many researchers have pointed out (McKinney et al, 2010;Wang et al, 2016).…”

“…Many studied also indicated the correlation between ARGs and nutrients McKinney et al, 2010;Wang et al, 2016). The result may stem in part from the fact that organics, nitrogen, and phosphate are necessary substrates for bacterial growth, involving those carrying ARGs.…”