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Identification of Super Antibiotic-resistant Bacteria in Diverse Soils

2015; Friends Science Publishers; Volume: 17; Issue: 06 Linguagem: Inglês

10.17957/ijab/15.0047

1814-9596

Qichun Zhang, Changping Hou, Imran Haider Shamsi, Essa Ali, Noor Muhammad, Jawad Munawar Shah, Abbas Ali Abid,

Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology

Environmental bacteria have been revealed to be a reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes and a potential pool of novel resistance genes in clinical pathogens.Recently, the soils, which have never been treated with antibiotics before have proved to contain the resistant bacterial strains.In this study, we assessed whether the soil that had not previously been influenced by antibiotics contained super-resistant bacteria or not.We identified super penicillin-resistant strains in four diverse soils containing up to 1000 mg/L penicillin compared to 100 mg/L, but none of super tetracycline resistant strains were detected in four soils containing up to 1000 mg/L tetracycline, which is the highest concentration of exogenous penicillin or tetracycline reported to date.Twenty bacterial isolates were selected, representing a diverse set of species in the genera Pseudomonas (85%) and Variovorax (15%); these bacteria showed multiple antibiotic resistance patterns for four or more antibiotics.Using polymerase chain reaction and sequence, we carefully examined the existence of antibiotic-resistance genes and integron genes in soils and strains.It was observed that the resistance genes tet(C) and blaTEM were fairly widely distributed in these super penicillin-resistant isolates, and 20%-50% of tested genes were found in the study soils.All the study sites provided great opportunities for horizontal resistance transfer.The antibiotic-resistant genes pool, which is potentially large and diverse, may have considerable implications for ecology and health.