A recent global scale study found that mining-impacted environments have multi-antibiotic resistance gene (ARG)-dominated resistomes with an abundance similar to urban sewage but much higher than freshwater sediment. These findings raised concern that mining may increase the risk of ARG environmental proliferation. The current study assessed how typical multimetal(loid)-enriched coal-source acid mine drainage (AMD) contamination affects soil resistomes by comparing with background soils unaffected by AMD. Both contaminated and background soils have multidrug-dominated antibiotic resistomes attributed to the acidic environment. AMD-contaminated soils had a lower relative abundance of ARGs (47.45 +/- 23.34 x /Gb) than background soils (85.47 +/- 19.71 x /Gb) but held high-level heavy metal(loid) resistance genes (MRGs, 133.29 +/- 29.36 x /Gb) and transposase- and insertion sequence-dominated mobile genetic elements (MGEs, 188.51 +/- 21.81 x /Gb), which was 56.26 % and 412.12 % higher than background soils, respectively.

Procrustes analysis showed that the microbial community and MGEs exerted more influence on driving heavy metal (loid) resistome variation than antibiotic resistome. The microbial community increased energy production-related metabolism to fulfill the increasing energy needs required by acid and heavy metal(loid) resistance. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) events primarily exchanged energy- and information-related genes to adapt to the harsh AMD environment. These findings provide new insight into the risk of ARG proliferation in mining environments.

View here for the details