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Metagenomic insights into tetracycline effects on microbial community and antibiotic resistance of mouse gut

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Abstract

Antibiotics have been widely used for disease prevention and treatment of the human and animals, and for growth promotion in animal husbandry. Antibiotics can disturb the intestinal microbial community, which play a fundamental role in animals’ health. Misuse or overuse of antibiotics can result in increase and spread of microbial antibiotic resistance, threatening human health and ecological safety. In this study, we used Illumina Hiseq sequencing, 1H nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and metagenomics approaches to investigate intestinal microbial community shift and antibiotic resistance alteration of the mice drinking the water containing tetracycline hydrochloride (TET). Two-week TET administration caused reduction of gut microbial diversity (from 194 to 89 genera), increase in Firmicutes abundance (from 24.9 to 39.8 %) and decrease in Bacteroidetes abundance (from 69.8 to 51.2 %). Metagenomic analysis showed that TET treatment affected the intestinal microbial functions of carbohydrate, ribosomal, cell wall/membrane/envelope and signal transduction, which is evidenced by the alteration in the metabolites of mouse serum. Meanwhile, in the mouse intestinal microbiota, TET treatment enhanced the abundance of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) (from 307.3 to 1492.7 ppm), plasmids (from 425.4 to 3235.1 ppm) and integrons (from 0.8 to 179.6 ppm) in mouse gut. Our results indicated that TET administration can disturb gut microbial community and physiological metabolism of mice, and increase the opportunity of ARGs and mobile genetic elements entering into the environment with feces discharge.

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Acknowledgments

This study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51290282 and 51278240), the Technology Support Project of Jiangsu Province (BE2013704) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (021114310018). We also would like to thank the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) of Nanjing University for the help of computation.

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse, School of the Environment, Nanjing University, 163 Xianlin Road, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Jinbao Yin, Xu-Xiang Zhang, Bing Wu & Qiming Xian

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  1. Jinbao Yin
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Yin, J., Zhang, XX., Wu, B. et al. Metagenomic insights into tetracycline effects on microbial community and antibiotic resistance of mouse gut. Ecotoxicology 24, 2125–2132 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10646-015-1540-7

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