Effect of antibiotics on bacterial populations: a multi-hierachical selection process

Antibiotics have been widely used for a number of decades for human therapy and farming production. Since a high percentage of antibiotics are discharged from the human or animal body without degradation, this means that different habitats, from the human body to river water or soils, are polluted with antibiotics. In this situation, it is expected that the variable concentration of this type of microbial inhibitor present in different ecosystems may affect the structure and the productivity of the microbiota colonizing such habitats. This effect can occur at different levels, including changes in the overall structure of the population, selection of resistant organisms, or alterations in bacterial physiology. In this review, I discuss the available information on how the presence of antibiotics may alter the microbiota and the consequences of such alterations for human health and for the activity of microbiota from different habitats.
The author’s laboratory is supported by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (BIO2014-54507-R) and JPI Water StARE JPIW2013-089-02-01) and from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (Spanih Network for Research on Infectious Diseases [RD16/0016/0011]).
We acknowledge support by the CSIC Open Access Publication Initiative through its Unit of Information Resources for Research (URICI).