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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Mathew BrownORCiD, Professor Thomas CurtisORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
© The Author(s) 2025.Antibiotic resistance poses a significant threat to human health, and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are important reservoirs of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). Here, we analyze the antibiotic resistomes of 226 activated sludge samples from 142 WWTPs across six continents, using a consistent pipeline for sample collection, DNA sequencing and analysis. We find that ARGs are diverse and similarly abundant, with a core set of 20 ARGs present in all WWTPs. ARG composition differs across continents and is distinct from that of the human gut and the oceans. ARG composition strongly correlates with bacterial taxonomic composition, with Chloroflexi, Acidobacteria and Deltaproteobacteria being the major carriers. ARG abundance positively correlates with the presence of mobile genetic elements, and 57% of the 1112 recovered high-quality genomes possess putatively mobile ARGs. Resistome variations appear to be driven by a complex combination of stochastic processes and deterministic abiotic factors.
Author(s): Zhu C, Wu L, Ning D, Tian R, Gao S, Zhang B, Zhao J, Zhang Y, Xiao N, Wang Y, Brown MR, Tu Q, Zhuang W, Zhou H, Zheng W, Zhang W, Zhang Q, Zhang C, Young M, Yang M, Yan T, Xi C, Wu L, Wu J-H, Woo S-G, West S, Weaver JE, Wang B, Wakelin S, Van Nostrand JD, Tooker NB, Sun C, Stephens K, de Sousa OV, Smith K, Sidhu J, Rossetti S, de los Reyes FL, Reginatto V, Parameswaran P, Palmer A, Meyers AJ, de Menezes FGR, Mendonca-Hagler LC, Liu Y, Li M, Li Z, Li Y, Lee ZMP, Leal CD, Kumari S, Keucken A, Marcantini DG, Johnson DR, Hu Z, Horn H, Harmon M, Hale L, Habagil M, Gu AZ, Griffin JS, Gomez JS, Ford A, Etchebehere C, Chen S, Cabrol L, Cabezas A, Bux F, Brewster RK, Bovio-Winkler P, Bott CB, Bond P, Boehnke K, de Abreu Mac Conell EF, de Araujo JC, Agullo-Barcelo M, Acevedo D, Ju F, Wells GF, Guo J, He Z, Nielsen PH, Wang A, Zhang Y, Chen T, He Q, Criddle CS, Wagner M, Tiedje JM, Curtis TP, Wen X, Yang Y, Alvarez-Cohen L, Stahl DA, Alvarez PJJ, Rittmann BE, Zhou J
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Nature Communications
Year: 2025
Volume: 16
Issue: 1
Online publication date: 29/04/2025
Acceptance date: 03/04/2025
Date deposited: 20/05/2025
ISSN (electronic): 2041-1723
Publisher: Nature Research
URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-59019-3
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-59019-3
Data Access Statement: The DNA sequences of the 16S rRNA gene and metagenomes generated in this study have been deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information database under the project accession number PRJNA509305. The assembled MAG sequences have been deposited in Zenodo [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14916172]. The source data underlying figures and Supplementary Figs. are provided as a Source Data file with this paper. The raw metagenomic sequences of metagenomic samples from other environments used in this study are available in the European Bioinformatics Institute Sequence Read Archive database (sewage: ERP015409 [https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB13831], soil:ERP020652{ https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB18701], gut: ERP004605 [https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB5224], ocean: [ERP001736 https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB1787]). No custom algorithms or software were used to generate and analyze data. R script: https://github.com/congminz/GWMC
PubMed id: 40301344
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