Abstract
A major forthcoming sanitary issue concerns the apparition and spreading of drug-resistant microorganisms, potentially threatening millions of humans. In low-income countries, polluted urban runoff and open sewage channels are major sources of microbes. These microbes join natural microbial communities in aquatic ecosystems already impacted by various chemicals, including antibiotics. These composite microbial communities must adapt to survive in such hostile conditions, sometimes promoting the selection of antibiotic-resistant microbial strains by gene transfer. The low probability of exchanges between planktonic microorganisms within the water column may be significantly improved if their contact was facilitated by particular meeting places. This could be specifically the case within biofilms that develop on the surface of the myriads of floating macroplastics increasingly polluting urban tropical surface waters. Moreover, as uncultivable bacterial strains could be involved, analyses of the microbial communities in their whole have to be performed. This means that new-omic technologies must be routinely implemented in low- and middle-income countries to detect the appearance of resistance genes in microbial ecosystems, especially when considering the new ‘plastic context.’ We summarize the related current knowledge in this short review paper to anticipate new strategies for monitoring and surveying microbial communities.
Highlights
Laboratoire d’Hygiène des Aliments et de l’Environnement, Institut Pasteur de Madagascar, BP 1274, MARBEC (IRD, IFREMER, UM2 and CNRS), University Montpellier, 34095 Montpellier, France; Centre de Recherche Océanologique (CRO), Abidjan BPV 18, Ivory Coast
The arrival of migrants from rural areas sustains the transfer of animals and environmental strains of bacteria, which mix with urban “microbiota.” In suburbs, surface water is often contaminated by animal and human feces from septic tanks or sewage discharges [4,5,6,7,8,9] (Figure 1)
When studies are conducted on river sediments, swine feces, lagoon water, liquid manure, or farmed soil, the resistance of environmental bacteria can reach 60%, 92%, 100%, and 30%, respectively [48]. For these uncultivable environmental bacteria, antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) can be searched using metagenomics, as illustrated in tannery wastewater [49], in which various ARGs have been identified at high abundance
Summary
The growth, diversity, and dynamics of pathogenic populations are shaped by environmental factors such as rainfall, temperature, nutrient loading, UV light, water flow, pH, and availability of carbon sources [29]. A good model to assess these effects is V. cholerae, as its proliferation is modulated by water temperature, pH, salinity, and plankton blooms [30] These environmental parameters strongly control both the abundance and diversity of aquatic communities, which, in turn, control pathogen proliferation. Sunlight, and nutrient inputs favor the growth of phytoplankton and bacteria (e.g., cyanobacteria) They control top-down relationships linking microbial communities (such as Vibrio sp.) with their environmental reservoir like shellfish and zooplankton [29,30,31,32]. Bacteria from the Firmicutes family can form endospores that can survive for several years in soil, plants, or sediments and are resistant to chlorination They can persist or be transported by environmental reservoirs [9], impacting the quality of drinking water extracted from surface water resources long after contamination
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