Protistan predation selects for antibiotic resistance in soil bacterial communities

Understanding how antibiotic resistance emerges and evolves in natural habitats is critical for predicting and mitigating antibiotic resistance in the context of global change. Bacteria have evolved antibiotic production as a strategy to fight competitors, predators and other stressors, but how predation pressure of their most important consumers (i.e., protists) affects soil antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) profiles is still poorly understood. To address this gap, we investigated responses of soil resistome to varying levels of protistan predation by inoculating low, medium and high concentrations of indigenous soil protist suspensions in soil microcosms. We found that an increase in protistan predation pressure was strongly associated with higher abundance and diversity of soil ARGs. High protist concentrations significantly enhanced the abundances of ARGs encoding multidrug (oprJ and ttgB genes) and tetracycline (tetV) efflux pump by 608%, 724% and 3052%, respectively. Additionally, we observed an increase in the abundance of numerous bacterial genera under high protistan pressure. Our findings provide empirical evidence that protistan predation significantly promotes antibiotic resistance in soil bacterial communities and advances our understanding of the biological driving forces behind the evolution and development of environmental antibiotic resistance.