Abstract
It is well verified that pig farms are an important reservoir and supplier of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). However, little is known about the transmission of ARGs between the breeding environment and subsequently produced pork. This study was conducted to investigate if ARGs and associated host bacteria spread from the breeding environment onto the meat through the food production chain. We thus analyzed the occurrence and abundance of ARGs, as well as comparing both ARG and bacterial community compositions in farm soil, pig feces and pork samples from a large-scale pig farm located in Xiamen, People’s Republic of China. Among the 26 target ARGs, genes conferring resistance to sulfonamide, trimethoprim, aminoglycoside, chloramphenicol, macrolide, florfenicol, and tetracycline were observed at high frequency in both the pig breeding environment and pork. The prevalence of ARGs in pork was surprisingly consistent with breeding environments, especially between the pork and feces. The relative abundance of 10 representative ARGs conferring resistance to six classes of antibiotics ranged from 3.01 × 10-1 to 1.55 × 10-6 copies/16S rRNA copies. The ARGs conferring resistance to sulfanilamide (sulI and sulII), aminoglycoside (aadA), and tetracycline [tet(A) and tet(M)] were most highly abundant across most samples. Samples from feces and meat possessed a higher similarity in ARG compositions than samples from the farms soil. Enterobacteriaceae found on the meat samples were further identical with previously isolated multidrug-resistant bacteria from the same pig farm. Our results strongly indicate that ARGs can be potentially spreading from pig breeding environment to meat via the pork industry chain, such as feed supply, pig feeding and pork production.
Highlights
The increasing prevalence and spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) from food animal sources has become a major public health concern (O’Neill, 2015)
The objectives of this study were (1) to determine the occurrence and abundance of ARGs in pig farm soil, fecal and meat samples collected from a large-scale pig farm based on PCR and real-time PCR methods; (2) to evaluate the similarity/difference of ARG compositions among different types of samples using non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analysis; and (3) to analyze the composition of the dominant bacterial community using PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) analysis
Sulfonamides/trimethoprim, tetracyclines, macrolides, penicillins and aminoglycosides are the most widely used groups of antibiotics in animal husbandry (Committee, 1999; Haller et al, 2002; Economou and Gousia, 2015), and ARGs associated to these antibiotics are generally detected most frequently in various livestock farms (Ho et al, 2010; Cheng et al, 2013; Zhu et al, 2013; Tao et al, 2014)
Summary
The increasing prevalence and spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) from food animal sources has become a major public health concern (O’Neill, 2015). Livestock farm environments, such as farmed soils and animal waste, have been considered the most important reservoirs for environmental ARGs, as high abundances of various ARGs have frequently been detected in these environments (Cheng et al, 2013; Zhu et al, 2013; Li et al, 2015; He et al, 2016; Fang et al, 2018; Qian et al, 2018). A potential transmission route of these antibiotic-resistant bacteria and ARGs from food animal sources to humans is the meat industry chain
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