2025/11/26 by Amani Jereb, Celestene Sebag, Asmaa A. Sadoon +4 · 1 voice
Environmental Science · #Pharmaceutical and Antibiotic Environmental Impacts #Fecal contamination and water quality #Environmental DNA in Biodiversity Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s41742-025-00979-1
openalex publication_date 2025/11/26 · openalex created_date 2025/11/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
Abstract Antibiotic resistance of harmful microorganisms is recognized as a serious threat to human and animal health, which is worsened by the dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). However, it remains challenging to identify ARGs in water samples and to distinguish intracellular (iARGs) and extracellular ARGs (eARGs). In this work, we present a feasibility study to use simple, practical methodologies to extract and distinguish ARGs in water samples using both filtration and centrifugation, followed by quantification using qPCR. Using both synthetic water samples and lake water samples, we demonstrated that the workflow reliably detected and quantified ARGs in synthetic samples. In the lake water sample, ARGs were detected at low concentrations and required a pre-concentration step to achieve detection. These methods may still need further enhancement and consideration of potential inhibitors of qPCR to be considered as a promising approach for monitoring ARGs in aqueous samples. Graphical Abstract