Protistan predation selects for antibiotic resistance in soil bacterial communities

Understanding how antibiotic resistance emerges and evolves in natural habitats is critical for predicting and mitigating antibiotic resistance in the context of global change. Bacteria have evolved antibiotic production as a strategy to fight competitors, predators and other stressors, but how pred...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The ISME Journal 2023-12, Vol.17 (12), p.2182-2189
Main Authors: Nguyen, Thi Bao-Anh, Bonkowski, Michael, Dumack, Kenneth, Chen, Qing-Lin, He, Ji-Zheng, Hu, Hang-Wei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
45/22
45/23
45/77
631/326/171/1818
631/326/22/1290
631/326/2522
Abundance
Antibiotic resistance
Antibiotics
Bacteria
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Drug resistance
Ecology
Efflux
Evolution
Evolutionary Biology
Genes
Life Sciences
Microbial Ecology
Microbial Genetics and Genomics
Microbiology
Predation
Predators
Soil microorganisms
Soil resistance
Soils
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Understanding how antibiotic resistance emerges and evolves in natural habitats is critical for predicting and mitigating antibiotic resistance in the context of global change. Bacteria have evolved antibiotic production as a strategy to fight competitors, predators and other stressors, but how predation pressure of their most important consumers (i.e., protists) affects soil antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) profiles is still poorly understood. To address this gap, we investigated responses of soil resistome to varying levels of protistan predation by inoculating low, medium and high concentrations of indigenous soil protist suspensions in soil microcosms. We found that an increase in protistan predation pressure was strongly associated with higher abundance and diversity of soil ARGs. High protist concentrations significantly enhanced the abundances of ARGs encoding multidrug ( oprJ and ttgB genes) and tetracycline ( tetV) efflux pump by 608%, 724% and 3052%, respectively. Additionally, we observed an increase in the abundance of numerous bacterial genera under high protistan pressure. Our findings provide empirical evidence that protistan predation significantly promotes antibiotic resistance in soil bacterial communities and advances our understanding of the biological driving forces behind the evolution and development of environmental antibiotic resistance.
ISSN:1751-7362
1751-7370
DOI:10.1038/s41396-023-01524-8