The use of antibiotics has grown dramatically over the past seven decades, and today these compounds are extensively used in human and veterinary medicine. When antibiotics were discovery in the 1940s, the scientific community prophesied the defeat of infectious diseases. However, antibiotic resistance quickly emerged, especially in clinical settings. This phenomenon is growing every year and is expected to increase even more in the future, and clinicians predict ten millions of deaths attributable to antibiotic resistance around the world by 2050.
Although many efforts are being made to avoid the above described scene, there is still a lack of understanding regarding antibiotic resistance, especially outside of clinical settings. Recent studies have demonstrated that both mobile genetic elements and genetic elements encoding resistance to many clinically-associated antibiotics are present in bacteria in environments not subjected to anthropogenic influence, suggesting a closed relationship between clinical settings and natural environments.
In the present work we applied in-silico comparison of environmental metagenomes and amplicon targeting of mobile genetic elements to assess correlations between antibiotic resistance genes in different environmental compartments, specifically focusing on the distribution and abundance of β-lactamase genes, which confer resistance to β-lactam antibiotics. Our preliminary results show important differences in the abundance and type of β-lactamase genes across the different environments. Additionally, we developed and applied a novel tool based on molecular and bioinformatic analyses to determinate the level of human impact on specific environmental microbiomes.
