The mobility and bacterial hosts of antibiotic resistance genes under high antibiotic selection pressure

we used metagenomic assembly and binning methods to decipher and compare the prevalence of ARGs and their potential mobility and hosts in AS reactors treating antibiotic wastewater. To do this, we operated lab-scale sequencing batch reactors of AS process by independently adding five antibiotics of cephalexin, chloramphenicol, kanamycin, sulfamethazine and tetracycline with high concentrations. Specifically, the objectives were (1) to reveal the co-selection effects of different antibiotics for antibiotic resistance by investigating the dynamics of co-existence between ARGs, (2) to evaluate the potential mobility of ARGs by identifying the co-occurrence patterns of ARGs and MGEs, and (3) to explore the host-association of ARGs by recovering large number of metagenome-assembled genomes from AS samples.