TY - JOUR
T1 - An underappreciated hotspot of antibiotic resistance
T2 - the groundwater near the municipal solid waste landfill
AU - Chen, Qing-Lin
AU - Li, Hu
AU - Zhou, Xin-Yuan
AU - Zhao, Yi
AU - Su, Jian-Qiang
AU - Zhang, Xian
AU - Huang, Fu-Yi
N1 - Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/12/31
Y1 - 2017/12/31
N2 - Landfills are so far the most common practice for the disposals of municipal solid waste (MSW) worldwide. Since MSW landfill receives miscellaneous wastes, including unused/expired antibiotics and bioactive wastes, it gradually becomes a huge potential bioreactor for breeding antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in landfill can flow to the environment through leakage of landfill leachate and pose a risk to public health. Using high throughput quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (HT-qPCR), we investigated the prevalence, diversity of ARGs and its association with various mobile genetic elements (MGEs) in MSW landfill groundwater. Totally 171 unique ARGs (belonging to 9 ARG types, encompassing 3 major resistance mechanisms) and 8 MGEs (6 transposase genes, and 2 integron-integrase genes) were identified. The normalized abundance of ARG was ranging from 0.24 to 5.66 copies/cell with multidrug, beta-lactams and tetracycline resistance genes being the most abundant ARG types. The co-occurrence pattern and significant correlation between MGEs and ARGs, indicated that MGEs may play an important role in the persistence and proliferation of ARGs. A Mantel test and Procrustes analysis suggested that ARG profiles were significantly correlated with bacterial community. Variation partitioning analysis (VPA) further demonstrated that bacterial community shifts contribute 65.8% of the total ARG variations. Additionally network analysis revealed that 15 bacterial taxa at family level might be the potential hosts of ARGs. These findings provide evidence that groundwater near MSW landfill is an underappreciated hotspot of antibiotic resistance and contribute to the spread of ARGs via the flowing contaminated groundwater.
AB - Landfills are so far the most common practice for the disposals of municipal solid waste (MSW) worldwide. Since MSW landfill receives miscellaneous wastes, including unused/expired antibiotics and bioactive wastes, it gradually becomes a huge potential bioreactor for breeding antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in landfill can flow to the environment through leakage of landfill leachate and pose a risk to public health. Using high throughput quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (HT-qPCR), we investigated the prevalence, diversity of ARGs and its association with various mobile genetic elements (MGEs) in MSW landfill groundwater. Totally 171 unique ARGs (belonging to 9 ARG types, encompassing 3 major resistance mechanisms) and 8 MGEs (6 transposase genes, and 2 integron-integrase genes) were identified. The normalized abundance of ARG was ranging from 0.24 to 5.66 copies/cell with multidrug, beta-lactams and tetracycline resistance genes being the most abundant ARG types. The co-occurrence pattern and significant correlation between MGEs and ARGs, indicated that MGEs may play an important role in the persistence and proliferation of ARGs. A Mantel test and Procrustes analysis suggested that ARG profiles were significantly correlated with bacterial community. Variation partitioning analysis (VPA) further demonstrated that bacterial community shifts contribute 65.8% of the total ARG variations. Additionally network analysis revealed that 15 bacterial taxa at family level might be the potential hosts of ARGs. These findings provide evidence that groundwater near MSW landfill is an underappreciated hotspot of antibiotic resistance and contribute to the spread of ARGs via the flowing contaminated groundwater.
KW - Journal Article
U2 - 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.07.164
DO - 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.07.164
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 28783909
SN - 0048-9697
VL - 609
SP - 966
EP - 973
JO - Science of the Total Environment
JF - Science of the Total Environment
ER -