Title: Antibiotics and Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Sediment of Honghu Lake and East Dongting Lake, China
Authors: Yuyi Yang, Xinhua Cao, Hui Lin, Jun Wang*
Affiliations: 1. Key Laboratory of Aquatic Botany and Watershed Ecology, Wuhan Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430074, China
2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
3. Institute of Environmental Resources and Soil Fertilizers, Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Hangzhou, China
4. Sino-Africa Joint Research Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430074, China
Year: 2016
Journal: Microbial Ecology
Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00248-016-0814-9
Abstract: Sediment is an ideal medium for the aggregation and dissemination of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). The levels of antibiotics and ARGs in Honghu Lake and East Dongting Lake of central China were investigated in this study. The concentrations of eight antibiotics (four sulfonamides and four tetracyclines) in Honghu Lake were in the range 90.00–437.43 μg kg-1 (dry weight (dw)) with mean value of 278.21 μg kg-1 dw, which was significantly higher than those in East Dongting Lake (60.02–321.04 μg kg-1 dw, mean value of 195.70 μg kg-1 dw). Among the tested three sulfonamide resistance genes (sul) and eight tetracycline resistance genes (tet), sul1, sul2, tetA, tetC, and tetM had 100 % detection frequency in sediment samples of East Dongting Lake, while only sul1, sul2, and tetC were observed in all samples of Honghu Lake. The relative abundance of sul2 was higher than that of sul1 at p＜0.05 level in both lakes. The relative abundance of tet genes in East Dongting Lake was in the following order: tetM >tetB > tetC > tetA. The relative abundance of sul1, sul2, and tetC in East Dongting Lake was significantly higher than those in Honghu Lake. The abundance of background bacteria may play an important role in the horizontal spread of sul2 and tetC genes in Honghu Lake and sul1 in East Dongting Lake, respectively. Redundancy analysis indicated that tetracyclines may play a more important role than sulfonamides in the abundance of sul1, sul2, and tetC gens in Honghu Lake and East Dongting Lake.
