Cyanobacterial extracellular antibacterial substances could promote the spread of antibiotic resistance: impacts and reasons†

Many studies have shown that antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) can be facilitated by a variety of antibacterial substances. Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic bacteria that are widely distributed in the ocean. Some extracellular substances produced by marine cyanobacteria have been found to possess antibacterial activity. However, the impact of these extracellular substances on ARGs is unclear. Therefore, we established groups of seawater microcosms that contained different concentrations (1000, 100, 10, 1, 0.1, 0.01, and 0 μg mL⁻¹) of cyanobacterial extracellular substances (CES), and tracked the changes of 17 types of ARGs, the integron gene (intI1), as well as the bacterial community at different time points. The results showed that CES could enrich most ARGs (15/17) in the initial stage, particularly at low concentrations (10 and 100 μg mL⁻¹). The correlation analysis showed a positive correlation between several ARGs and intI1. It is suggested that the abundance of intI1 increased with CES may contribute to the changes of these ARGs, and co-resistance of CES may be the underlying reason for the similar variation pattern of some ARGs. Moreover, the results of qPCR and high-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA showed that CES had an inhibitory impact on the growth of bacterial communities. High concentrations of CES were found to alter the structure of bacterial communities. Co-occurrence networks showed that bacteria elevated in the high concentration group of CES and might serve as the potential hosts for a variety of ARGs. In general, marine cyanobacteria could play an important role in the global dissemination of ARGs and antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARBs).