Occurrence and abundance of tetracycline, sulfonamide resistance genes, and class 1 integron in five wastewater treatment plants

Abstract

To understand the transport and fate of antibiotic resistance genes in wastewater treatment plants, 12 resistance genes (ten tetracycline resistance genes, two sulfonamides genes) and class 1 integron gene (intI1) were studied in five wastewater treatment plants with different treatment processes and different sewage sources. Among these resistance genes, sulfonamides genes (sul1 and sul2) were of the most prevalent genes with detection frequency of 100%. The effluent water contained fewer types of resistance genes than the influent in most selected plants. The abundance of five quantified resistance genes (tetG, tetW, tetX, sul1, and intI1) decreased in effluent of plants treating domestic or industrial wastewater with anaerobic/aerobic or membrane bioreactor (MBR) technologies, but tetG, tetX, sul1, and intI1 increased along the treatment units of plants treating vitamin C production wastewater by anaerobic/aerobic technology. In plant treating cephalosporins production wastewater by UASB/aerobic process, the quantities of tetG, tetX, and sul1 first decreased in anaerobic effluent water but then increased in aerobic effluent water.

The impact of on-site hospital wastewater treatment on the downstream communal wastewater system in terms of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance genes

“…Previous studies showed that secondary wastewater treatment decreased half of 78 detected ARGs by < 94% in concentration (Yang et al, 2014), while tertiary treatment has been found to retain 2%-50% of ARG raw influent concentrations (Mao et al, 2015). Generally UWWTPs were shown to have varying effects on ARG concentrations depending on wastewater treatment conditions and the type of ARG, even for wastewater treatment plants with tertiary treatment steps (Du et al, 2014;Rodriguez-Mozaz et al, 2015).…”

Bacterial lineages putatively associated with the dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes in a full-scale urban wastewater treatment plant

“…Quantitative PCR (qPCR) was used to quantify class 1 integrase genes (intI1), selected ARGs (blaTEM,blaSHV,sul1,sul2,and qnrS), and the 16S rRNA gene as a measurement of total bacteria, using the conditions listed in Table S2. The ARGs, conferring resistance to antibiotics of different classes, as beta-lactams, sulfonamides and fluoroquinolones were selected based on their common occurrence in domestic wastewater and widespread distribution in other environmental compartments (Narciso-da-Rocha et al, 2014;Szczepanowski et al, 2009;Zhang et al, 2009;Du et al, 2014;Varela et al, 2016Varela et al, , 2015b).…”

Fate and proliferation of typical antibiotic resistance genes in five full-scale pharmaceutical wastewater treatment plants

“…bio.ua.pt/), which implicated that the dominant subtypes of sul1 and bla OXA-1 in PWWTPs were partly attributed by class 1 integron propagation. Additionally, tetW and intI1 (class 1 integrase gene) were also widely detected in several municipal WWTPs (Du et al, 2014), and abundance of tetW (copies/mL) was significantly correlated to the abundance of intI1 (copies/mL) (R 2 = 0.799, p = 0.016) (Table S7).…”