Sewage treatment plant serves as a hot-spot reservoir of integrons and gene cassettes.

This study investigated the occurrence and abundance of class 1 integrons and related antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in a sewage treatment plant (STP) of China. Totally, 189 bacterial strains were isolated from influent, activated sludge and effluent, and 40 isolates contained the integons with a complete structure. The intI1-carrying isolates were found to harbor two types of gene cassettes: dfr17-aadA5 and aadA2, conferring resistances to trimethoprim and streptomycin, which were further confirmed by antimicrobial susceptibility analysis. Many other gene cassettes were carried on integron, including qnrVC1, catB-8-blaoxa-10-aadA1-aac(6'), aadB-aacA29b, aadA2, aac(6')-1b, aadA6 and aadA12, which were detected using DNA cloning. Quantitative real time PCR showed that over 99% of the integrons was eliminated in activated sludge process, but average copy number of integrons in given bacterial cells was increased by 56% in treated sewage. Besides integrons, other mobile gene elements (MGEs) were present in the STP with high abundance. MGEs and the associated ARGs may be wide-spread in STPs, which constitute a potential hot spot for selection of antibiotic resistant bacteria and horizontal transfer of ARGs.

Metagenomic analysis of cadmium and copper resistance genes in activated sludge of a tannery wastewater treatment plant.

In order to comprehensively characterize the copper and cadmium resistance in activated sludge of a tannery wastewater treatment plant, a resistance protein database of the two heavy metals was manually created by retrieving annotated sequences and related information from the public databases and published literatures. The metagenomic DNA was extracted from the activated sludge for Illumina high-throughput sequencing, and the obtained 11,973,394 clean reads (1.61 Gb) were compared against the established databases using BLAST tool. Annotations of the BLAST hits showed that 222 reads (0.019‰) and 197 reads (0.016‰) were identified as copper and cadmium resistance genes, respectively. Among the identified cadmium resistance genes, czcA encoding cobalt-zinc-cadmium resistance protein had the highest abundance (83 reads, 0.0069‰), which was further confirmed by annotation of the open reading frames predicted with the assembly contigs. Among the copper resistance genes, copA (66 reads, 0.0055‰) was most abundant, followed by copK and cusR. Alignment against the Clusters of Orthologous Groups (COG) database also suggested that 87.26% of the matched reads were grouped in COG0474 (cation transport ATPase). This study may be practically helpful for exploring various functional genes in the environment using high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics methods.