Environ Sci Pollut Res (2016) 23:19495–19503 DOI 10.1007/s11356-016-7048-8
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Reductions of bacterial antibiotic resistance through five biological treatment processes treated municipal wastewater Qing-Bin Yuan 1,2 & Mei-Ting Guo 2 & Wu-Ji Wei 1 & Jian Yang 2
Received: 25 December 2015 / Accepted: 6 June 2016 / Published online: 6 July 2016 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016
Abstract Wastewater treatment plants are hot spots for antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). However, limited studies have been conducted to compare the reductions of ARB and ARGs by various biological treatment processes. The study explored the reductions of heterotrophic bacteria resistant to six groups of antibiotics (vancomycin, gentamicin, erythromycin, cephalexin, tetracycline, and sulfadiazine) and corresponding resistance genes (vanA, aacC1, ereA, ampC, tetA, and sulI) by five benchscale biological reactors. Results demonstrated that membrane bioreactor (MBR) and sequencing batch reactor (SBR) significantly reduced ARB abundances in the ranges of 2.80∼3.54 log and 2.70∼3.13 log, respectively, followed by activated sludge (AS). Biological filter (BF) and anaerobic (upflow anaerobic sludge blanket, UASB) techniques led to relatively low reductions. In contrast, ARGs were not equally reduced as ARB. AS and SBR also showed significant potentials on ARGs reduction, whilst MBR and UASB could not reduce ARGs effectively. Redundancy analysis implied that the purification of wastewater quality parameters (COD, NH4+-N, and turbidity) performed a positive correlation to ARB and ARGs reductions.
Responsible editor: Gerald Thouand Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11356-016-7048-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Mei-Ting Guo
[email protected]
1
College of Environment, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 211800, China
2
College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
Keywords Antibiotic-resistant bacteria . Antibiotic resistance genes . Reduction . Biological treatment process . Municipal wastewater . Redundancy analysis
Introduction Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are considered as important reservoirs of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) (Rizzo et al. 2013; Pruden 2014). Wastewater provides a favorable environment, including high contents of microbial biomass, relatively abundant nutrients and antibiotic agents, for both the ARB survival and the ARGs transfer (Guardabassi et al. 2002; Rizzo et al. 2013). Bacteria including many pathogens (e.g., enterobacteria, enterococci, Staphylococcus aureus, and Aeromonas) resistant to nearly all clinically relevant antibio t i c s h av e b ee n re p o r t e d i n W W T P s w o r l d w i d e (Guardabassi et al. 2002; Castiglioni et al. 2008; Borjesson et al. 2009; Novo and Manaia 2010; Reinthaler et al. 2010). More than 140 ARGs have also been detected in WWTPs up to 2009 (Szczepanowski et al. 2009; Zhang et al. 2009). Because WWTPs are not specially designed for the removal of ARB and ARGs (Pruden et al. 2013), their excess sludge biomass and effluents still contain large amounts of the contaminants (Reinthaler et al. 2003; Borjesson et al. 2009; Novo and Manaia 2010), which transfer to the subsequent environments and impose great potential threats on public health. Controlling antibiotic resistance in WWTPs is of great concerns of microbiologists and wastewater engineers (Rizzo et al. 2013). Wastewater disinfection, as a pathogen inactivation process, is considered as an important barrier to limit the release of ARB and ARGs into the environment (Guo et al. 2013b). However, the general observation is that the disinfection adopted in WWTPs shows limited efficacy on antibiotic
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resistance reduction. Some kinds of ARB are reported to express tolerance to chlorination (Huang et al. 2011; Yuan et al. 2015a), causing them difficult to be removed. Ultraviolet (UV) disinfection is also frequently reported for a weak reduction of ARB or ARGs (Munir et al. 2011; Guo et al. 2013a; Zhang et al. 2015). The limited reduction by chlorination and UV disinfection possibly partly attributes to the excessive abundances of ARB or ARGs. Increasing the dose usually contribute to the significant improvement of reduction efficiency (Engemann et al. 2006; Macauley et al. 2006; Zhang et al. 2015). One lab-scale study noted that doubling the typical UV dose applied in WWTPs was required to destroy vanA, mecA, tetA, and ampC (McKinney and Pruden 2012). Apparently, a biological process with the effective reduction of ARB and ARGs is essential for the subsequent disinfection. Numerous studies have explored the effects of biological treatment on the reduction of antibiotic resistance level (Sharma et al. 2016). Christgen and colleagues used metagenomics approaches to contrast the fate of ARGs in anaerobic, aerobic, and anaerobic–aerobic sequence (AAS) bioreactors treating domestic wastewater (Christgen et al. 2015); they found that AAS and aerobic reactors were better than anaerobic units in reducing ARGs abundances. Result of Munir et al. (2011) indicated that membrane bioreactor displayed significantly higher removals of ARGs and ARB than conventional treatment plants. Chen and Zhang (2013) investigated the removal efficiencies of 6 ARGs (tetM, tetO, tetQ, tetW, sulI, and sulII) by three advanced treatment processes and found that constructed wetlands showed higher reductions (1∼3 log) than biological aerated filter (0.6∼1.2 log). However, most current studies are conducted in various WWTPs with different raw sewage and abiotic environments (Chen and Zhang 2013). The reduction of antibiotic resistance by various biological treatment processes with identical conditions is rarely reported. This possibly weakens the reliability of the comparison, since wastewater qualities and abiotic conditions are frequently reported to affect the ARB/ARGs fates during biological treatment processes (Mc Mahon et al. 2007; Novo et al. 2013; Yang et al. 2014; Yuan et al. 2014). On the other hand, the fate of ARGs in WWTPs was usually inconsistent with their ARB (Gao et al. 2012; Huang et al. 2014; Huang et al. 2015). The single exploration of ARB or ARGs might both make biases, since numerous genes usually encode resistance to the same antibiotic, and only a tiny minority ( 0.05). The purifications of COD, NH4+-N, and turbidity all exhibited positive correlations to ARB or ARG reductions. Biological processes with effective purifications of conventional wastewater quality parameters would partially contribute to the promotion of antibiotic resistance reduction. Acknowledgment This project was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51308399) and the Shanghai Natural Science Foundation (13ZR1443300). The authors would like to thank the engineers of the WWTP for their assistance in obtaining the wastewater samples.
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