Blocking antibiotic resistance contamination dissemination to neutralized the impacts of bacterial oxidative stress via efficient photocatalysis

ABSTRACT: Antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) transmission in wastewater, seriously threaten the ecological safety and human health, which attracted increasing attention throughout the world. However, the correlations between bacterial interaction and environmental stress in photo-inactivation are rarely studied. In this study, the efficient ARGs photo-inactivation of ZIF@CF QDs-Fe were explored. The experimental results revealed that leaked e-ARGs and mobile genetic elements (MGEs) were immediately captured and attacked by the extracellular ROS, which blocking the antibiotic-resistance dissemination. Meanwhile, ZIF@CF QDs-Fe photo-treatment further neutralized the negative effect of ROS (·OH, ·O2–) induced oxidative stress, benefiting for the controlling of ARGs conjugative transfer. Combined with bacterial interactions, both bacterial density and abundance of ARGs host was synergically reduced when photo-treatment progressed, thus alleviating the natural dissemination risk of ARGs. Meanwhile, the downregulation of transporter proteins and antibiotic target proteins elucidated that ARGs transcription and bacterial reproduction were significantly suppressed under photo-inactivation. Interestingly, partial of antibiotic bacterial sensitivity would be recovered through the regulations of bacterial functional expressions and further alleviated potential ecological risk. Overall, these findings shed light on the inactivation mechanism of nanomaterial mediated photo-treatment in blocking the resistance transfer pathways, giving valuable guidance for mitigating the antibiotic resistance dissemination in wastewater treatments.

ORGANISM(S): Wastewater Metagenome

SUBMITTER: Liangliang Wei  

PROVIDER: PXD067488 | iProX | Tue Aug 19 00:00:00 BST 2025

REPOSITORIES: iProX