Antibiotic resistance: The role of chemical pollution in urban wastewater

Environments with high levels of pollutants (chemicals, antibiotics) are hotspots for the dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes (ARG). Presence of chemical stressors facilitate transfer of ARG to bacteria.

Although the contribution of ARG spread to global resistance is well understood, the dynamics of resistance spread from the environment to clinically relevant bacteria is currently an enigma.

Our research focus on the impact of bacteriophages within such setting - a mechanism that historically has been considered of low importance but where new data is suggesting a key role.We hypothesize that i) bacteriophages can be induced by chemical stressors, ii) phage resistome in induced phages depend on choice of stressor, iii) induced phages are capable of spreading resistance to sensitive bacteria and play a major role in global spread of antibiotic resistance, and iv) by identifying these chemical stressors we may be able to develop tools to monitor and limit the spread of antibiotic resistance.We thus propose to combine time-resolved spatial sampling of contaminated rivers in Bangladesh, South Africa, and Sweden; chemical analysis using multiple techniques based on NMR and high-resolution mass spectrometry; and highly controlled bench-scale gene transduction assays to unravel the dynamics of clinically relevant ARG spread through bacteriophages.

This integrative One Health-approach thus fills an important gap in our knowledge of the control of ARG fluxes.