Speaker
Description
Wildlife is increasingly seen as a reservoir of environmental AMR, yet a pristine baseline to interpret it is missing. We characterized the resistome, metallome, biocidome and mobilome of 84 soil metagenomes from 24 sites and three sympatric Pygoscelis species on the Antarctic Peninsula, for multi-species comparison of ornithogenic soils. The resistome is dominated by a ubiquitous core (45 genes in >90% of samples; 92.8% of abundance) of intrinsic mechanisms (efflux, target alteration) in environmental psychrophilic genera with no recognized pathogens. Five independent lines show no mobility signatures: 99.3% chromosomal location, decoupling of insertion sequences, fragmented MGE candidates, marginal lysogeny, and no clinical plasmids or resistance-bearing integrons. Antibiotic, metal and biocide resistance co-vary with community phylogeny while mobile elements remain decoupled: resistance is inherited with genomes, not between them. The resistome converges across all three species: community explains ~30% of variance and guano ~3%, while the core assembles deterministically, the periphery stochastically (NST 0.05 vs 0.69). No local anthropogenic signal appeared: the resistome was unstructured by distance to stations. Resistance is a vertically inherited, ecologically integrated trait carried chromosomally, not on mobile elements, positioning Antarctica as a sentinel baseline of pre-antibiotic resistance for tracking anthropogenic and climate-driven change.
Keywords
Antimicrobial resistance genes, metagenomics, Pygoscelis, Antarctica, ornithogenic soils, environmental baseline
| Registration ID | OHS26-148 |
|---|---|
| Professional Status of the Speaker | Postdoc |
| Junior Scientist Status | Yes, I am a Junior Scientist. |
Author
Co-authors
External references
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