Data for: Can heavy metal pollution induce soil bacterial community resistance to antibiotics in boreal forests?

The emergence of microbial antibiotic resistance is a central threat to global health, food security, and development. It has been shown that heavy metal pollution can give rise to microbial resistance to antibiotics, but how wide-spread this phenomenon is remains an open question that urgently needs filling to enable appropriate environmental risk assessments. Here, we determined whether long-term differences in heavy metal pollution in boreal forests had affected soil microbial communities such that they had increased microbial resistance to antibiotics. First, we assessed variation in metal concentrations in samples collected across a distance trajectory from the pollution source, and also the microbial rates and levels of bacterial community resistance to the heavy metal Cu and the antibiotics tetracycline and vancomycin in those samples. Second, we tested if the exposure to Cu or tetracycline could increase bacterial community resistance to Cu and to antibiotics in soils with high ...