Cultivation-dependent and high-throughput sequencing approaches studying the co-occurrence of antibiotic resistance genes in municipal sewage system

During the past years, antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) leading for the spreading of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) became a global problem, especially multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria are considered the prime culprit of antibiotic resistance. However, the correlation between the antibiotic-resistant phenotype and the ARG profiles remains poorly understood. In the present study, metagenomic functional screening and metagenomic analysis of coliforms were combined to explore the phenotype and genotype of the ARBs from municipal sewage. Our results showed that the ARG co-occurrence was widespread in the municipal sewage. The present study also highlighted the high abundance of ARGs from antibiotic resistance coliforms especially the MDR coliforms with ARG level of 33.8 ± 4.2 copies per cell. The ARG profiles and the antibiotic resistance phenotypes of the isolated antibiotic resistant coliforms were also correlated and indicated that the resistance to the related antibiotic (ampicillin, kanamycin, erythromycin, chloramphenicol, and tetracycline) was mostly contributed by the ARGs belonging to the subtypes of β-lactamase, aminoglycoside 3-phosphotransferase, phosphotransferase type 2, chloramphenicol acetyltransferase, tetA, etc.