A historical legacy of antibiotic utilization on bacterial seed banks in sediments
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Microbiology, Health Policy, Public Health, Natural Resource Management
- Keywords
- Antibiotic resistance, endospores, Clostridia, tetracycline, sulfonamide, sediments, seed bank
- Copyright
- © 2017 Madueño et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. A historical legacy of antibiotic utilization on bacterial seed banks in sediments. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3361v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3361v1
Abstract
The introduction of antibiotics for both medical and non-medical purposes has had a positive effect in human welfare and agricultural output in the past century. However, there is also an important legacy in the use and disposal of antimicrobial agents in natural ecosystems. This historical legacy was investigated by quantifying two antibiotic resistance genes (ARG) conferring resistance to tetracycline (tet(W)) and sulfonamide (sul1) in bacterial seed bank DNA in sediments. The industrial introduction of antibiotics caused an abrupt increase in the total abundance of tet(W) and a steady increase in sul1. The abrupt change in tet(W) corresponded to an increase in relative abundance from ca. 1960 that peaked around 1976. This pattern of accumulation was highly correlated with the abundance of specific members of the seed bank community belonging to the Phylum Firmicutes. In contrast, the relative abundance of sul1 increased after 1976. This correlated with a taxonomically broad spectrum of bacteria, reflecting sul1 dissemination through horizontal gene transfer. The accumulation patterns of both ARGs correspond to the temporal scale of medical antibiotic use. Our results show that the bacterial seed bank can be used to look back at the historical usage of antibiotics and resistance prevalence.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Total abundance of tetracycline and sulfonamide in sediment
Total abundance (gene copies/g of sediment) of two genes conferring resistance to the antibiotics tetracycline (tet(W)) and sulfonamide (sul1) in sediment samples covering the period between 1920 and 2010 in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Quantification was made in DNA extracted from the seed bank (SB DNA) and total microbial community (total DNA).
