医療系研究科在学生がThe 16th International Joint Workshop on Advanced Engineering Technology for Environment and Energyでベストプレゼンテーション賞を受賞しました。

三澤さんは「Estimation of the presence of antibiotic resistance genes in wastewater treatment plants and hospital wastewater using class 1 integrons」について発表しました。

　【INTRODUCTION】
Antimicrobial resistance has been regarded as one of the major global health threats. Water environments are recognized as one of the reservoirs and transmission routes of antibiotic resistance agents. The class 1 integron-integrase (intI1) gene has been proposed as an indicator for ARB, as it can carry gene cassettes encoding antibiotic resistance. However, intI1 gene monitoring could not distinguish human-impacted and not human-impacted intI1 genes (Quintela-Baluja et al., 2021). This can lead to overestimation of human health risks by ARB in aquatic environments. In this study, we measured intI1 gene concentrations in intracellular DNA (iDNA) and extracellular DNA (eDNA) in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and hospital wastewater (HW), by further classifying human-impacted intI1 into those with/without gene cassette using aint1 and eaint1 assays, to estimate the fate of ARB and ARGs in detail.


　【CONCLUSIONS】
The concentration of intI1 was 1.4 to 11.4 times higher than that of aint1, resulting in an overestimation if we use intI1 as an indicator for ARGs. The concentrations of aint1 decreased during the wastewater treatment process.
However, more than 7 log10 and 4 log10 copies/L of aint1 as iDNA and eDNA, respectively, were released into the water environment. The efficiency of horizontal gene transfer of antibiotic resistance genes in the water environment needs to be further evaluated.