antibiotic resistance gene abundances correlate with metal and geochemical conditions in archived scottish soils抗生素抗性基因的丰度与金属和归档苏格兰土壤地球化学条件.pdfVIP

Antibiotic Resistance Gene Abundances Correlate with Metal and Geochemical Conditions in Archived Scottish Soils 1 . ´ ´ 1. 2 3,4 3 Charles W. Knapp * , Seanın M. McCluskey , Brajesh K. Singh , Colin D. Campbell , Gordon Hudson , David W. Graham5 1 Department of Civil Engineering, David Livingstone Centre for Sustainability, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2 Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, University of Western Sydney, Penrith, Australia, 3 The James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen, United Kingdom, 4 Department of Soil and Environment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden, 5 School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom Abstract The vast majority of antibiotic resistant genes (ARG) acquired by human pathogens have originated from the natural environment. Therefore, understanding factors that influence intrinsic levels of ARG in the environment could be epidemiologically significant. The selection for metal resistance often promotes AR in exposed organisms; however, the relationship between metal levels in nature and the intrinsic presence of ARG has not been fully assessed. Here, we quantified, using qPCR, the abundance of eleven ARG and compared their levels with geochemical conditions in randomly selected soils from a Scottish archive. Many ARG positively correlated with soil copper levels, with approximately half being highly significant (p ,0.05); whereas chromium, nickel, lead, and iron also significantly correlated with specific ARG. Results show that geochemical metal conditions