Metagenomic Approaches for Antibiotic Resistance Gene Detection in Wastewater Treatment Plants

Abstract

Antibiotic resistance has raised serious concerns in recent years because of the increasing reports about superbugs and the inefficiency of antibiotics in treating life‐threatening infections. The emergence of antibiotic resistance “is a complex problem driven by many interconnected factors; single, isolated interventions have little impact”, as declared by the World Health Organization. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are regarded as significant reservoirs and sources of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in the environment. Descriptive metagenomics is a culture‐independent molecular method that relies on metagenomic sequences for the search, annotation, and prediction of genes in environmental samples. This chapter focuses on the databases and platforms for ARG detection using metagenomic approaches. Antibiotic resistance genes database (ARDB) and comprehensive antibiotic resistance database (CARD) also provide online analysis, but the capabilities of these platforms are far from sufficient to process the huge amount of data generated by high throughput sequencing for metagenomic analysis.