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Environmental Emerging Contaminants Drive Bacterial Antimicrobial Resistance Evolution: Evidence, Mechanisms, and Challenges
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This review summarizes existing research on how pollutants like microplastics, along with other environmental chemicals, may promote bacterial resistance to antibiotics. It describes four possible mechanisms, including stress responses in bacteria, gene sharing between bacteria, and microplastics carrying resistance genes, and points to gaps needing further study.
Antimicrobial resistance in the environment has become a major challenge to global public health. In addition to antibiotics themselves, emerging contaminants such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), persistent organic pollutants (POPs), and microplastics also significantly influence the emergence, evolution, and dissemination of bacterial antimicrobial resistance. This systematic review, based on a structured literature search, first summarizes current evidence linking emerging contaminants to bacterial antimicrobial resistance across diverse environmental matrices. It also provides a mechanistic analysis of four major pathways by which emerging contaminants promote antimicrobial resistance evolution: ROS–SOS-mediated adaptive evolution, enhanced horizontal gene transfer (HGT), selective enrichment of resistant bacteria, and microplastic-mediated migration and dissemination of antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs). Finally, we highlight current knowledge gaps and propose future research directions, including long-term field investigations, multi-omics approaches, experiment–model integration, and artificial intelligence-assisted analyses, to establish a cross-scale framework for understanding emerging contaminant-driven antimicrobial resistance evolution. This review provides new mechanistic insights into the environmental evolution of bacterial antimicrobial resistance and offers a theoretical foundation for environmental risk assessment and pollution control of emerging contaminants.
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