Spatiotemporal profiling of class 1 integrons and IncP-1 plasmids in an aquatic ecosystem heavily impacted by urban and industrial anthropic pressures
Abstract
Although natural aquatic environments have progressively been recognized as playing a central role in the propagation of antibiotic resistance, they remain difficult to apprehend because of the thousands of existing resistance determinants, thus justifying the use of proxies. Nevertheless, most prevalence studies have focused on searching for anthropic inputs using comparative approaches, paying little attention to the multiple sources of variation observed, whether real or analytical. In this work, we examined in detail the molecular prevalence of two proxies for antibiotic resistance determinants, namely class 1 integrons and IncP-1 plasmids, in a 23 km long river continuum impacted by anthropic activities. A combination of nested and nested-factorial experiments demonstrated that the seasonality dominates over the position of sampling sites along the river in explaining variations in the abundance of these two proxies. Conversely, the sampling depth in the water column as well as analytical parameters, such as the reproducibility of DNA extractions and quantitative PCRs, do not significantly contribute to variation in the proxy abundances. Comparing data obtained from different sampling sites demonstrated that long distances are necessary to observe a significant increase in class 1 integron abundances in the river water and that the two proxies behave independently, thus highlighting both their complementarity as proxies and their distinct origins. The progressive input of integrons along the river continuum, which initially appeared as moderate, became more pronounced when analyzing their content in resistance gene cassettes, as the latter better represent the multiplicity and differences of the pollution sources. Our results provide an integrated view of the fluctuations in the abundance of class 1 integrons and IncP-1 plasmids, and bring up some limitations in using them as proxies for antibiotic resistance.
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BibTeX
@article{barron2026spatiotemporal,
title = {{Spatiotemporal profiling of class 1 integrons and IncP-1 plasmids in an aquatic ecosystem heavily impacted by urban and industrial anthropic pressures}},
author = {Magali de la Cruz Barrón and Xavier Bellanger and Armand Maul and Charlène Sagrillo and Hélène Guilloteau and Emmanuelle Montargès-Pelletier and Christophe Merlin},
journal = {Heliyon},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45121},
url = {https://hal.univ-lorraine.fr/hal-05735628v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Spatiotemporal profiling of class 1 integrons and IncP-1 plasmids in an aquatic ecosystem heavily impacted by urban and industrial anthropic pressures
AU - Magali de la Cruz Barrón
AU - Xavier Bellanger
AU - Armand Maul
AU - Charlène Sagrillo
AU - Hélène Guilloteau
AU - Emmanuelle Montargès-Pelletier
AU - Christophe Merlin
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/02
JO - Heliyon
DO - 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45121
UR - https://hal.univ-lorraine.fr/hal-05735628v1
AB - Although natural aquatic environments have progressively been recognized as playing a central role in the propagation of antibiotic resistance, they remain difficult to apprehend because of the thousands of existing resistance determinants, thus justifying the use of proxies. Nevertheless, most prevalence studies have focused on searching for anthropic inputs using comparative approaches, paying little attention to the multiple sources of variation observed, whether real or analytical. In this work, we examined in detail the molecular prevalence of two proxies for antibiotic resistance determinants, namely class 1 integrons and IncP-1 plasmids, in a 23 km long river continuum impacted by anthropic activities. A combination of nested and nested-factorial experiments demonstrated that the seasonality dominates over the position of sampling sites along the river in explaining variations in the abundance of these two proxies. Conversely, the sampling depth in the water column as well as analytical parameters, such as the reproducibility of DNA extractions and quantitative PCRs, do not significantly contribute to variation in the proxy abundances. Comparing data obtained from different sampling sites demonstrated that long distances are necessary to observe a significant increase in class 1 integron abundances in the river water and that the two proxies behave independently, thus highlighting both their complementarity as proxies and their distinct origins. The progressive input of integrons along the river continuum, which initially appeared as moderate, became more pronounced when analyzing their content in resistance gene cassettes, as the latter better represent the multiplicity and differences of the pollution sources. Our results provide an integrated view of the fluctuations in the abundance of class 1 integrons and IncP-1 plasmids, and bring up some limitations in using them as proxies for antibiotic resistance.
SN - 2405-8440
ER -