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 innately influence the potential for AR in soil. We suggest soil geochemical data might be used to estimate baseline gene presence on local, regional and global scales within epidemiological risk studies related to AR transmission from the environment.
| Original language | English |
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| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | PLoS One |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2011 |
Open Access - Access Right Statement
© 2011 Knapp et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Keywords
- antibiotic resistant genes
- bacteria
- human pathogens
- natural environment
- soil
- trace metals