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Occurrence of heavy metals, antibiotics, and antibiotic resistance genes in different kinds of land-applied manure in China

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Abstract

Various pollutants remaining in the livestock and poultry manures pose potential threat to the soil ecosystem during land application, whose impact should be appreciated. The occurrence of heavy metals, antibiotics, and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in swine manure (SM), chicken manure (CM), and the SM organic fertilizer (OF) were investigated. The order of total concentrations of antibiotics detected in manures was as follows: SM > CM > OF. The amount of ciprofloxacin (CIP) in SM reached up to 6.61 mg/kg, which only occupied 1% of the antibiotic concentration reported in the past years. The total concentration of thirteen ARGs in CM ranked first, reaching 7.35 × 1011 copies/g, among which the strB gene was detected with the highest concentration. It was worth noting that the qnr ARGs were persistent in OF with the absence of corresponding antibiotics, indicating ARGs were harder to remove than antibiotics during manure composting. Zn and Cu (46.5–843 mg/kg) were obviously higher than other seven heavy metals, and significantly correlated with most ARGs (p < 0.01). This study provided the basic data of the pollution in animal manures that will be land-applied, illuminating the original source of potential risk in soil ecosystem.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51679141) and National Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (31100404).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Environmental Risk Assessment and Control on Chemical Process, School of Resources and Environmental Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, China

    Jiajia Xue, Yaru Hu, Shijie Yao, Kuangfei Lin & Changzheng Cui

  2. Shanghai Institute of Pollution Control and Ecological Security, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Jiajia Xue & Changzheng Cui

  3. Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences, 508 Qinzhou Road, Shanghai, 200233, China

    Jianqiang Wu & Chenyan Sha

  4. College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Donghua University, 2999 Renmin North Road, Shanghai, 201600, China

    Peng Li

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  1. Jiajia Xue
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  2. Jianqiang Wu
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Contributions

The manuscript was reviewed and approved for publication by all authors. CC and JW conceived and designed the experiments. JX, JW, and YH performed the experiments. JX, CS, and SY analyzed the data. JX and CC wrote the paper. JX, JW, YH, CS, SY, PL, KL, and CC reviewed and revised the paper.

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Correspondence to Jianqiang Wu or Changzheng Cui.

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Xue, J., Wu, J., Hu, Y. et al. Occurrence of heavy metals, antibiotics, and antibiotic resistance genes in different kinds of land-applied manure in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 40011–40021 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-13307-9

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