Bacterial community assembly and antibiotic resistance genes in soils exposed to antibiotics at environmentally relevant concentrations

Understanding how bacterial community assembly and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) respond to antibiotic exposure is essential to deciphering the ecological risk of anthropogenic antibiotic pollution in soils. In this study, three loam soils with different land management (unmanured golf course, dairy‐manured pasture, and swine‐manured cornfield) were spiked with a mixture of 11 antibiotics at the initial concentration of 100 and 1000 μg kg−1 for each antibiotic and incubated over 132 days, mimicking a scenario of pulse disturbance and recovery in soils, with unspiked soil samples as the control treatment. The Infer Community Assembly Mechanisms by Phylogenetic‐bin‐based null model (iCAMP) analysis demonstrated that drift and dispersal limitation contributed to 57%–65% and 16%–25%, and homogeneous selection 12%–16% of soil bacterial community assembly. Interestingly, antibiotic exposure to 1000 μg kg−1 level significantly increased the contribution of drift to community assembly, largely due to the positive response from Acidobacteria‐6 in the golf course and pasture soils and from Chthoniobacteraceae in the cornfield soil to the antibiotic exposure. However, ARG abundance and diversity in the three soils exhibited antibiotics‐independent temporal fluctuations, but were associated with the changes in soil bacterial communities over time. This study provides the first insight into the relative contributions of different bacterial community assembly processes in soils upon antibiotic exposure at environmentally relevant concentrations.