Prevalence of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria ESKAPE among Healthy People Estimated by Monitoring of Municipal Wastewater.

There is increasing attention toward factors that potentially contribute to antibiotic resistance (AR), as well as an interest in exploring the emergence and occurrence of antibiotic resistance bacteria (ARB). We monitored six ARBs that cause hospital outbreaks in wastewater influent to highlight the presence of these ARBs in the general population. We analyzed wastewater samples from a municipal wastewater treatment plant (MWWTP) and hospital wastewater (HW) for six species of ARB: Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteria (CARBA), extended-spectrum ß-lactamase producing Enterobacteria (ESBL), multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter (MDRA), multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa (MDRP), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE). We registered a high percentage of ARBs in MWWTP samples (>66%) for all ARBs except for MDRP, indicating a high prevalence in the population. Percentages in HW samples were low (<78%), and no VRE was detected throughout the study. CARBA and ESBL were detected in all wastewater samples, whereas MDRA and MRSA had a high abundance. This result demonstrated the functionality of using raw wastewater at MWWTP to monitor the presence and extent of ARB in healthy populations. This kind of surveillance will contribute to strengthening the efforts toward reducing ARBs through the detection of ARBs to which the general population is exposed.

Discovery of novel unfunctional pAMT allele pamt 10 causing loss of pungency in sweet bell pepper (Capsicum annuum L.).

Pungency is a characteristic trait of pepper (Capsicum spp.). Two genes, Pun1 and pAMT, are known as determinative factors of pepper pungency. To date, it has been considered that most bell-type sweet peppers (called piman and paprika, in Japan) possess the identical mutated Pun1 allele, pun1, whereas pAMT mutated non-pungent pepper has been found only in non-bell-type pepper. In this study, to reconsider the uniformity of the source of non-pungency in sweet bell pepper and explore new genetic resources, the presence of pun1 was investigated in 26 sweet bell pepper varieties. Among them, a seemingly common sweet bell pepper 'Color Piman Yellow' had the intact Pun1, in spite of its non-pungency. Sequencing and linkage analyses revealed that 'Color Piman Yellow' possessed a novel mutated pAMT allele, pamt 10 , that has a nonsense substitution at the 11th exon responsible for non-pungency. This is the first pAMT mutant to be found in sweet bell pepper. The finding that there was a pAMT mutant in sweet bell pepper suggests the possibility that more pAMT mutants exist unconsciously in other sweet bell peppers. The discovery of a new factor of non-pungency contributes to expanding the genetic diversity of sweet pepper varieties.