Antibiotics pollution in Jiulong River estuary: source, distribution and bacterial resistance

To gain insight into the antibiotic pollution in the Jiulong River estuary and the pollutant sources, we analyzed the concentration of 22 widely-used antibiotics in water samples collected from the river and estuary, 17 and 18 sampling sites, respectively. Contamination with sulfonamides, quinolones and chloramphenicols was frequently detected and the distribution pattern of antibiotics suggested that most of the pollutants are from the Jiulong River, especially from the downstream watersheds. To reveal the ecological effects, we isolated 35 bacterial strains from the estuary and analyzed their antibiotic resistance to the eight most frequently detected antibiotics. The bacteria were subsequently classified into seven different genera by 16SrDNA sequencing. Up to 97.1% of the bacteria showed resistance and 70.6% of strains showed multi-resistance to these antibiotics, especially to sulfonamides. This study demonstrated a pattern of antibiotic contamination in the Jiulong River and its estuary and illustrated high bacterial antibiotic resistance which was significantly correlated with the average antibiotics concentrations and detected frequencies in the estuary.