Urban Enviromental Genomics Project

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are thought to be potential incubators of antibiotic resistance. Persistence of commonly used antibiotics in wastewater may increase the potential for survival and horizontal transfer of adaptive genes in bacterial populations, some of which may pose a threat to human health. In this study, we assayed the concentrations of ten common antibiotics in wastewater influents, treatment stage influents and effluents, and upstream and downstream surface waters from two Charlotte area wastewater plants, including residential and hospital trunkline locations. We performed whole genome shotgun sequencing, to assay the taxonomic and resistome compositions at each of these sites across four time points during the late winter to mid-summer of 2016.