Effect of antibiotics in the environment on microbial populations

Antibiotics act as an ecological factor in the environment that could potentially affect microbial communities. The effects include phylogenetic structure alteration, resistance expansion, and ecological function disturbance in the micro-ecosystem. Numerous studies have detected changes of microbial...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied microbiology and biotechnology 2010-07, Vol.87 (3), p.925-941
Main Authors: Ding, Chang, He, Jianzhong
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anthropogenic factors
Anti-Bacterial Agents - pharmacology
Antibiotic resistance
Antibiotics
Aquatic environment
Bacteria
Bacteria - drug effects
Bacteria - genetics
Bacteria - metabolism
Biological and medical sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biotechnology
Community structure
Dehydrogenases
Drug Resistance, Bacterial
Ecological function
Ecosystems
Environmental Microbiology
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Life Sciences
Manures
Methanogenesis
Microbial activity
Microbial community
Microbial Genetics and Genomics
Microbiology
Mini-Review
Natural environment
Phylogenetics
Resistance gene
Respiration
Risk assessment
soil
Soil environment
Sulfate reduction
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Summary:Antibiotics act as an ecological factor in the environment that could potentially affect microbial communities. The effects include phylogenetic structure alteration, resistance expansion, and ecological function disturbance in the micro-ecosystem. Numerous studies have detected changes of microbial community structure upon addition of antibiotics in soil and water environment. However, the causal relationship between antibiotic input and resistance expansion is still under debate, with evidence either supporting or declining the contribution of antibiotics on alteration of antibiotic resistance. Effects of antibiotics on ecological functions have also been discovered, including nitrogen transformation, methanogenesis, and sulfate reduction. In the latter part, this review discusses in detail on factors that influence antibiotic effects on microbial communities in soil and aquatic environment, including concentration of antibiotics, exposure time, added substrates, as well as combined effects of multiple antibiotics. In all, recent research progress offer an outline of effects of antibiotics in the natural environment. However, questions raised in this review need further investigation in order to provide a comprehensive risk assessment on the consequence of anthropogenic antibiotic input.
ISSN:0175-7598
1432-0614
DOI:10.1007/s00253-010-2649-5