Understanding the Determinants of Environmental Resistomes in Urban and Natural Ecosystems

Abstract

The spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) is a great public health threat faced by humanity in the 21st century. However, our understanding of the abiotic and biotic factors determining the distribution of ARGs in the environment is lacking. This knowledge gap hampers our ability to design efficient management strategies to mitigate the dissemination of environmental ARGs. Soil and plant phyllosphere are the two largest environmental habitats of microorganisms and the most important reservoirs of environmental ARGs. In urban ecosystems, soil and plants in green spaces are major interfaces between environmental microbiome and human microbiome, which are closely related to the welling..