Bacteriophages as vehicles for antibiotic resistance genes in the environment

[...]the environment is continually exposed to a wide variety of antimicrobials and their metabolites through wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) discharges, agricultural runoff, and animal feeding operations, which may contribute to the emergence and spread of ARGs. [...]the large-scale mixing of environmental bacteria with exogenous bacteria from anthropogenic sources provides the ideal selective and ecological conditions for the emergence of resistant bacteria [7]. [...]the use of metagenomic data generated via high-throughput sequencing has revealed that most ARGs found in nonpathogenic soil bacteria have perfect nucleotide identity to ARGs from several human pathogens, suggesting that recent horizontal gene transfer via MGEs has occurred between those organisms [17].