Elsevier

Gene

Volume 581, Issue 2, 1 May 2016, Pages 178-182
Gene

Short communication
Preliminary analysis showed country-specific gut resistome based on 1267 feces samples

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gene.2016.01.043Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Comprehensive analysis on ARG accumulation in GM of three continents

  • ARG accumulation is robust globally and Chinese hold the most abundant ARGs.

  • Antibiotic application scope and delivery time tend to impose effect on ARG accumulation.

  • Government policy should be a reason for region-specific distribution of ARGs.

Abstract

Gut microbiota (GM) plays an important role in drug metabolism and absorption. Ever-increasing antibiotic use could result in high accumulation of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in GM, which will reduce the recovery rate of many infectious diseases. The foci of this study is to unravel ARG distribution in GM of 1267 subjects from four countries in three continents, by annotation with ARDB (Antibiotic Resistance Genes Database) and ARG-ANNOT database. Analysis results showed that all three continents had similar ARG composition, but Chinese had the highest ARG relative abundance, followed by American and European. This is possibly attributed to delayed policies on antibiotic use in China, and restrict legislation in Europe. Delivery time and application scope are proportional to ARG enrichment in GM. Findings in this study indicate that ARG accumulation could be associated with government policies on antibiotic use, and corresponding delivery time and application scope, which will be a significant reference to control antibiotic abuse.

Introduction

The human gut is home to trillions of microbes (Qin et al., 2010, Li et al., 2014). Antibiotic abuse may lead to high abundance of various ARGs in human gut (Forslund et al., 2013), which could be transferred to microbial counterparts through MGEs (Davies & Davies, 2010) and delivered to new-born babies (Zhang et al., 2011). This will reduce the recovery rate of many infectious diseases and impact infants' health negatively, leading to a higher burden in public health. Since antibiotic are widely used in medicine (Goossens et al., 2005a) and food animal production (Davies & Davies, 2010), it will be significant to understand discrepancy of gut resistome at population-scale.

Kristoffer Forslund et al. demonstrated country-specific gut resistome based on 252 fecal samples from several countries (Forslund et al., 2013). In this report, ARGs were compared among these countries. And determinants for antibiotic resistance were also analyzed by various factors, including carriage by time in use, antibiotic policies of countries, possible origins and antibiotic use of corresponding hosts.

Previous findings did not cover enough samples, representing the main continents. Meanwhile, ARGs may be enriched in highly different microbes, suggestive of distinct microbial composition induced by diet, lifestyle and antibiotic regulation. Based on this, it will be important to collect data of more feces samples in different continents, and perform deep analysis on distribution pattern of ARGs in these continents to identify diversified ARG acquirement models. Based on this, we intended to integrate the newest reference catalogue of human gut microbiome (Li et al., 2014) and tried to disclose distribution of various antibiotic resistance determinants globally. Then, the evolution of these determinants could be traced and linked to veterinary and human medicine consumption, suggesting additional guidance to control antibiotic abuse.

Section snippets

Data collection and processing

The non-redundant gene catalog and gene profiles of 1267 human stool samples were collected from ICG website (http://meta.genomics.cn) (Li et al., 2014), including 139 American, 368 Chinese, 401 Danish and 359 Spanish samples from HMP, NCBI database, MetaHIT project, EBI and GEO database. All of the gene profiles were based on above public metagenomics sequencing, which were processed by the MOCAT pipeline (Kultima et al., 2012).

ARG annotation

To identify accumulation of ARGs in GM of different countries,

ARGs are spread in human guts

Totally 112 ARGs were distributed widely in guts of more than 90% humans living in different countries (Table 1). Antibiotic glycopeptides harbored the most diverse ARGs (41 types) in comparison to others, all of which was vancomycin resistance genes (Table 1). MLS resistance genes were the second most diverse, which contained 24 types of ARGs. Tetracyclines and beta-lactamases related ARGs (15 and 14 types, respectively) were also widely distributed in all four countries (Table 1). These

Discussion

Antibiotic abuse leads to highly abundant ARGs in gastrointestinal microbiota (Wright, 2007), which is a giant challenge for the health and food animal industry globally (WHO, 2014). However, distinct regulations on food and drug could lead to discrepant distribution of ARGs among countries. Therefore, analysis of ARGs in GM from different countries will promote interpretation about how these regulations or lifestyles impact human health, due to the important role of GM (Qin et al., 2010, Li et

Conclusions

This study reviewed the accumulation of gut ARGs for the most integrated gene catalogue of human gut microbiome. It suggests that Chinese holds most abundant gut ARGs, by comparison with European and American. Meanwhile, permission to antibiotic use in food animals and antibiotic delivery time is proportional to ARG enrichment globally. This will provide an important reference to understand antibiotic abuse and corresponding impact on antibiotic resistance.

Conflict of interest

All authors declare no competing interests.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program 863 (No: 2014AA022210-04).

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