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The unreasonable use of antibiotics and the transmission of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) induced by antibiotics have led to a large number of ARGs entered the water environment, which seriously threatened human health and environmental safety. The estuarine aquatic environment connects with inland rivers and sea and is frequently influenced by human activities. This study aims to reveal the occurrences and abundances of ARGs and bacterial community composition by high-throughput quantitative PCR including 296 primers and high-throughput sequencing in the tide rising and ebbing of surface water in the Yongjiang Estuary, China. The results showed that there were a large number of ARGs and mobile genetic elements (MGEs) detected in the rising tide and ebb tide water bodies. The numbers of detected ARGs in each sample at rising and ebb tide ranged from 16 to 77 and 61 to 88, respectively, and the absolute abundance ranges were 1.69 × 10 4 -1.69 × 10 9 copies/L and 3.18 × 10 3 -2.57 × 10 9 copies/L, respectively. Obvious tidal distribution characteristics of ARGs were showed. Most of ARGs conferred resistance to multidrug, aminoglycosides and sulfanilamides. Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria and Bacteroidetes were the dominantly bacterial phylum in the Yongjiang Estuary. Network analysis results indicated that multi-genera were identified as possible ARGs hosts, and they carried more than two types of ARGs genes. Partial least squares path modeling further revealed that MGEs and bacterial community composition were the most important driving factors. The results of the study can provide the corresponding scientific basis for the diffusion and control of ARGs in estuaries., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Antibiotics have been widely detected in bay ecosystems, yet little is known regarding their distribution, composition, sources, ecological and human health risks at the regional scale. We developed a systematic framework to mine data from existing publications and compiled an antibiotic concentration-based dataset containing 439 samples from 30 bays, and compared antibiotics across bays and matrices (water, sediment, and biota). Antibiotic concentrations varied considerably between bays, with hotspots occurring in East Asia. The main categories of antibiotics in waters included sulfonamide and macrolide, while tetracycline, quinolone, and macrolide antibiotics were prevalent in sediments. The main sources of antibiotics in bays included sewage treatment plant effluent, domestic sewage, agriculture runoff, and discharges from mariculture activities. Antibiotics with high ecological risks mainly included sulfamethoxazole, erythromycin, clarithromycin, and oxytetracycline. Erythromycin posed a considerable risk to human health, and the human health risks presented by other antibiotics were negligible. Regional variations of concentrations correspond to the uneven geographic consumption of antibiotics and their removal rate during wastewater treatment. Differences in antibiotics' composition between matrices are associated mainly with the physicochemical properties of antibiotics (e.g., molecular structure, solubility, and stability) and the content of total organic carbon, metal ions, chlorophyll a, and clay minerals in the sediments. To reduce the ecological and human health implications, priority should be given to the removal of erythromycin, sulfamethoxazole, oxytetracycline, and clarithromycin, with a special focus on their treatment in the Asian bay areas., (Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Antibiotics are used to fight diseases in humans and farm animals. Their residues, however, can enter aquatic environments and affect the resistance of non-target microbial strains, and the prevalence of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) potentially poses negative impacts on human health. In order to better understand how the studies of antibiotics have been conducted, we analyzed the publications on antibiotics in aquatic systems for the period of 1945-2017. We applied a bibliometric analysis method by coupling cluster analysis and network analysis. Results indicated that early research on antibiotics in water was mostly performed in America and Europe, while, in recent years, publications for the same subject were dominated by China and the USA. The majority of the articles were published in journal Chemosphere and the most representative subject categories of the seven sections were "Environmental science and ecology," "Chemistry," "Engineering," "Biochemistry and molecular biology," "Water resources," "Agriculture," and "Pharmacology and pharmacy." The most studied class of antibiotics was tetracyclines in wastewater. Antibiotic resistance, ARGs, Escherichia coli, and some mechanistic studies such as adsorption, toxicity, degradation, and kinetics were common topics in this field. ARGs present a major public health concern and much attention should be directed at the problems with antibiotics in the future studies of water.