Abstract
Soil biomes are vast, exceptionally diverse and crucial to the health of ecosystems and societies. Soils also contain an appreciable, but understudied, diversity of opportunistic human pathogens. With climate change and other forms of environmental degradation potentially increasing exposure risks to soilborne pathogens, it is necessary to gain a better understanding of their ecological drivers. Here we use the Galleria mellonella insect virulence model to selectively isolate pathogenic bacteria from soils in Cornwall (UK). We find a high prevalence of pathogenic soil bacteria with two genera, Providencia and Serratia, being especially common. Providencia alcalifaciens, P. rustigianii, Serratia liquefaciens and S. plymuthica strains were studied in more detail using phenotypic virulence and antibiotic resistance assays and whole-genome sequencing. Both genera displayed low levels of antibiotic resistance and antibiotic resistance gene carriage. However, Serratia isolates were found to carry the recently characterized metallo-β-lactamase blaSPR-1 that, although not conferring high levels of resistance in these strains, poses a potential risk of horizontal transfer to other pathogens where it could be fully functional. The Galleria assay can be a useful approach to uncover the distribution and identity of pathogenic bacteria in the environment, as well as uncover resistance genes with an environmental origin.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 5327-5340 |
| Journal | Environmental Microbiology |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| Early online date | 29 Sept 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2020 |
Funding
SCB was supported by the MRC Consortium for Medical Microbial Bioinformatics (CLIMB) grant MR/L015080/1. AB received funding by the BBSRC. Genome sequencing was provided by MicrobesNG ( http://www.microbesng.uk ). All papers published by researchers at the University of Exeter must include a data access statement, also known as a data availability statement, describing where and how any underlying data may be accessed, ideally including a link to the data using a persistent identifier. Although mentioned in the Methods, I was advised to have this included in the Acknowledgments as well (if there is no dedicated section for data access statements): The research data can be access via the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) at EMBL‐EBI (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/home) under the accession numbers listed in Tables S4 and S5.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Microbiology
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
