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Effects of polypropylene microplastics on digestion performance, microbial community, and antibiotic resistance during microbial anaerobic digestion
Summary
Researchers studied how polypropylene microplastics affect the anaerobic digestion process used to treat wastewater sludge. While small amounts of microplastics slightly increased methane production, they also promoted the spread of antibiotic resistance genes among bacteria in the digesters. This means microplastics in wastewater systems could contribute to the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which poses a serious threat to human health.
As an emerging pollutant, microplastics (MPs) have attracted increasing attention worldwide. The effects of polypropylene (PP) MPs on digestion performance, behaviors of dominant microbial communities, antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and mobile genetic elements in microbial anaerobic digesters were investigated. The results showed that the addition of PP-MPs to digesters led to an increase in methane production of 10.8% when 300 particles/g TSS of PP-MPs was introduced compared with that in digester not treated with PP-MPs. This increase was attributed to the enrichment of acetogens such as Syntrophobacter (42.0%), Syntrophorhabdus (27.0%), and Syntrophomonas (10.6%), and methanogens including Methanobacterium and Methanosaeta. tetX was highly enriched due to PP-MP exposure, whereas parC exhibited the greatest increase (35.5% - 222.7%). Horizontal gene transfer via ISCR1 and intI1 genes might play an important role in the spread of ARGs. Overall, these findings provide comprehensive insight into the ecological dynamics of PP-MPs during microbial anaerobic digestion.
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