Mass-immigration shapes the antibiotic resistome of wastewater treatment plants

Lanping Zhang; Bob Adyari; Liyuan Hou; Xiaoyong Yang; Mahmoud Gad; Yuwen Wang; Cong Ma; Qian Sun; Qiang Tang; Yifeng Zhang; Chang-Ping Yu; Anyi Hu

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.168193

Mass-immigration shapes the antibiotic resistome of wastewater treatment plants

Sci Total Environ. 2024 Jan 15:908:168193. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.168193. Epub 2023 Oct 30.

Authors

Lanping Zhang¹, Bob Adyari², Liyuan Hou³, Xiaoyong Yang⁴, Mahmoud Gad⁵, Yuwen Wang¹, Cong Ma⁶, Qian Sun¹, Qiang Tang⁷, Yifeng Zhang⁸, Chang-Ping Yu⁹, Anyi Hu¹⁰

Affiliations

¹ CAS Key Laboratory of Urban Pollutant Conversion, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China; Fujian Key Laboratory of Watershed Ecology, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China.
² CAS Key Laboratory of Urban Pollutant Conversion, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China; Fujian Key Laboratory of Watershed Ecology, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China; Department of Environmental Engineering, Universitas Pertamina, Jakarta 12220, Indonesia.
³ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Utah State University, UT 84322, USA; Utah Water Research Laboratory, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322, USA.
⁴ School of Environmental and Material Engineering, Yantai University, 30 Qingquan Road, Yantai 264005, China.
⁵ Water Pollution Research Department, National Research Centre, Giza 12622, Egypt.
⁶ Xiamen Municipal Environmental Technology Co., Ltd., Xiamen 361001, China.
⁷ Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China.
⁸ Department of Environmental and Resource Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark.
⁹ CAS Key Laboratory of Urban Pollutant Conversion, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China.
¹⁰ CAS Key Laboratory of Urban Pollutant Conversion, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China; Fujian Key Laboratory of Watershed Ecology, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China. Electronic address: ayhu@iue.ac.cn.

PMID: 37914134
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.168193

Abstract

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are the hotspots for the spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) into the environment. Nevertheless, a comprehensive assessment of the city-level and short-term daily (inter-day) variations of ARG profiles in the whole process (influent-INF, activated sludge-AS and effluent-EF) of WWTPs is still lacking. Here, 285 ARGs and ten mobile gene elements were monitored in seven WWTPs in Xiamen for seven days via high-throughput qPCR. The average daily load of ARGs to WWTPs was about 1.32 × 10²⁰ copies/d, and a total of 1.56 × 10¹⁸ copies/d was discharged to the environment across the entire city. Stochastic processes were the main force determining the assembly of ARG communities during sampling campaign, with their relative importance ranked in the order of INF > EFF > AS. There're little daily variations in ARG richness, abundance, β-diversity composition as well as assembly mechanisms. The results of SourceTracker, variation partitioning analysis, and hierarchical partitioning analysis indicated that bacteria and ARGs from upstream treatment processes played an increasingly dominant role in shaping ARG communities in AS and EFF, respectively, suggesting the importance of mass-immigration of bacteria and ARGs from the source on ARG transport in wastewater treatment processes. This emphasizes the need to revise the way we mitigate ARG contamination but focus on the source of ARGs in urban wastewater.

Keywords: Antibiotic resistance genes; Assembly mechanisms; Daily variation; Mass immigration; Wastewater treatment plant.

MeSH terms

Anti-Bacterial Agents*
Bacteria / genetics
Emigration and Immigration
Genes, Bacterial*
Wastewater

Substances

Anti-Bacterial Agents
Wastewater