报告主题：Ecological and evolutionary drivers of antimicrobial resistance in the environment

主讲人：Uli Klümper（德累斯顿工业大学）

主持人：李猛教授

时 间：2024年11月08日周五15：00

地 点：深圳大学致知楼706

嘉宾简介：

Dr. Klümper’s main research focus is on understanding the proliferation of antimicrobial resistance in the environment with a specific focus on the underlying ecological and evolutionary processes involved. He is specifically interested in the spread and selection dynamics of antibiotic resistance genes and plasmids in complex bacterial communities and the environmental drivers that cause changes in their abundance in the environments. To identify such drivers, he has developed several state-of-the-art microbiological and molecular methods to quantify plasmid transfer and the mobility of antibiotic resistance genes. His particular focus in recent years has been how maintaining environmental microbiome diversity can serve as a barrier to the spread of antimicrobial resistance.

报告摘要：

Limiting the spread of AMR in the environment requires an understanding of the existing environmental dispersal barriers. During the last century environmental microbiomes have constantly been subjected to invasion events by antimicrobial resistant bacteria (ARB) and their associated resistance genes (ARGs) which have been enriched or released through anthropogenic activities. For an invasion process to be successful the invader has to overcome the biotic resilience towards invasion of the habitat, a process that is becoming more difficult with increasing biodiversity. The capacity to exploit the resources provided by a given habitat is enhanced when communities exhibit a greater diversity, which, in turn, reduces the opportunities for invaders, leading to a lower persistence of the invading organisms. Putting these observations into the context of AMR dissemination, it is reasonable to assume that - as any invader - ARB reaching a natural community may persist longer when the biodiversity of the indigenous community is low, in turn increasing the chance of horizontal gene transfer of the carried ARGs to the indigenous community. Reciprocally, high microbial diversity could serve as a long-term barrier towards invasion by ARB and ARGs.

In our recent studies we were able to demonstrate that microbial diversity can indeed serve as the proposed barrier towards AMR proliferation in the environment. It can limit the short-term and long-term invasion of AMR bacteria into environmental soil and river biofilm communities. In addition, we were able to proof that the cost of harbouring a resistance gene are increased in complex community context, hence limiting the persistence of successfully invading ARGs.