Metagenomic Profiling of Internationally Sourced Sewage Influents and Effluents Yields Insight into Selecting Targets for Antibiotic Resistance Monitoring.

ABSTRACT: It has been debated whether wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) primarily act to attenuate or amplify antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). However, ARGs are highly diverse with respect to their resistance mechanisms, mobilities, and taxonomic hosts and therefore their behavior in WWTPs should not be expected to be universally conserved. We applied metagenomic sequencing to wastewater influent and effluent samples from 12 international WWTPs to classify the behavior of specific ARGs entering and exiting WWTPs. In total, 1079 different ARGs originating from a variety of bacteria were detected. This included ARGs that could be mapped to assembled scaffolds corresponding to nine human pathogens. While the relative abundance (per 16S rRNA gene) of ARGs decreased during treatment at 11 of the 12

SUBMITTER: Garner E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11411718 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature