Evaluating Quantitative Metagenomics for Environmental Monitoring of Antibiotic Resistance and Establishing Detection Limits.

ABSTRACT: Metagenomics holds promise as a comprehensive, nontargeted tool for environmental monitoring. However, one key limitation is that the quantitative capacity of metagenomics is not well-defined. Here, we demonstrated a quantitative metagenomic technique and benchmarked the approach for wastewater-based surveillance of antibiotic resistance genes. To assess the variability of low-abundance oligonucleotide detection across sample matrices, we spiked DNA reference standards (meta sequins) into replicate wastewater DNA extracts at logarithmically decreasing mass-to-mass percentages (m/m%). Meta sequin ladders exhibited strong linearity at input concentrations as low as 2 × 10^-3 m/m% (R² > 0.95), with little to no reference length or GC bias. At a mean sequencing dept

SUBMITTER: Davis BC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11966778 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature