Antibiotic resistance genes in surface water of eutrophic urban lakes are related to heavy metals, antibiotics, lake morphology and anthropic impact

Abstract

Urban lakes are impacted by heavy human activities and represent potential reservoirs for antibiotic resistance genes. In this study, six urban lakes in Wuhan, central China were selected to analyze the distribution of sulfonamide resistance (sul) genes, tetracycline resistance (tet) genes and quinolone resistance (qnr) genes and their relationship with heavy metals, antibiotics, lake morphology and anthropic impact. sul1 and sul2 were detected in all six lakes and dominated the types of antibiotic resistance genes, which accounted for 86.28-97.79% of the total antibiotic resistance gene abundance. For eight tested tet genes, antibiotic efflux pumps (tetA, tetB, tetC, and tetG) genes were all observed in six lakes and had higher relative abundance than ribosomal protection protein genes (tetM and tetQ). For 4 plasmid mediated quinolone resistance genes, only qnrD is found in all six lakes. The class I integron (intI1) is also found to be a very important media for antibiotic resistance gene propagation in urban lakes. The results of redundancy analysis and variation partitioning analysis showed that antibiotic and co-selection with heavy metals were the major factors driving the propagation of antibiotic resistance genes in six urban lakes. The heavily eutrophic Nanhu Lake and Shahu Lake which located in a high density building area with heavy human activities had the higher relative abundance of total antibiotic resistance genes. Our study could provide a useful reference for antibiotic resistance gene abundance in urban lakes with high anthropic impact.

Proliferation of antibiotic resistance genes in coastal recirculating mariculture system

“…The results indicated that the emergence of resistance genes were deduced by multiple factors, rather than solely caused by the abuse of antibiotics in this system. Many studies indicated that ARGs were correlated with many factors Jiao et al, 2017;Yang et al, 2017). According to previous investigation, correlation between tet genes and tetracyclines were considerably weak in municipal wastewater treatment plant (Gao et al, 2012b).…”

Occurrence of Highly Resistant Microorganisms in Ruai Wastewater Treatment Plant and Dandora Dumpsite in Nairobi County, Kenya

“…Today, antibiotics are not only used as medicine for humans but are also widely used in animal husbandry and aquaculture. However, antibiotics that are unintentionally discharged into the environment pose a great threat to ecosystems and human health [27] [28]. These antibiotics can accumulate in food webs and, even more alarming, antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) can be transferred between environmental bacteria and human pathogens [28] [29] [30] [31].…”

Comparison of Microbiomes and Resistomes in Two Karst Groundwater Sites in Chongqing, China

“…The abundant and universal ARGs in rivers and lakes are related to sulfonamide, tetracycline, Beta-Lactamase, macrolides, quinolone, streptomycin, efflux pumps gene and Class I integrons, vancomycin, ampicillin, florfenicol resistance genes are also appeared (Jiang et al 2013;Basso et al 2014;Stange et al 2016;Suhartono and Savin 2016;Yang et al 2017Yang et al , 2018Zhang et al 2017;Su et al 2018). The ARGs will neutralize the benefit antibiotics once given to human beings (Baker 2015;Hiltunen et al 2017).…”