The key environmental influencing factors for the change of sediment bacterial community and antibiotics resistance genes in a long-term polluted lake, China.

In order to investigate the key environmental influencing factors for the change of sediment bacterial community structure (BCS) and antibiotics resistance genes (ARGs) in a long-term Quinolone antibiotics (QNs) and heavy metals (HMs) polluted lake, 16S rRNA MiSeq High-throughput Sequencing and Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States (PICRUSt) analysis methods were applied. Baiyangdian lake was subdivided into three habitats: (1) Habitat 1: greatly influenced by municipal wastewater; (2) Habitat 2: mainly impacted by aquaculture sewage and domestic wastewater; and (3) Habitat 3: with the least human activities. Through One-way ANOVA analysis, the results showed that most of QNs and HMs showed significant difference among three habitats. Both the highest richness and diversity indices of bacterial community appeared in Habitat 3. The abundance of Multidrug, Phenicol, Aminoglycoside, Teracycline, and Quinolone ARGs exhibited the highest values in Habitat 1, while the abundance of Macrolide-Lincosamide-Streptogramin (MLS), Rifamycinm, and Sulfonamide ARGs appeared the highest values in Habitat 2. The result of redundancy analysis exhibited that 68.8% and 93.8% of the change in BCS and ARGs can be explained by environmental factors, respectively. Pb (explained 37.5% (p = 0.002)) and Fleroxacin (FLE) (explained 51.3% (p = 0.026)) were the most important factors for the variation of BCS and ARGs, respectively. Therefore, the effects of antibiotics and HMs on BCS and ARGs should be simultaneously paid more attention. Furthermore, the ARGs results by PICRUSt were similar to the results by metagenomic shotgun sequencing analysis, thus the PICRUSt analysis method can be used in the future research.