Browsing by Subject "wastewater monitoring"

The objective of the study was to demonstrate proof-of-concept for ResistApp – a newly developed digital platform for antibiotic resistance monitoring in hospital wastewater. ResistApp combines culture-independent, high throughput gene quantification with automated data analysis to synthesise and visualise monitoring data in an interactive dashboard. To do this, wastewater of two hospitals in Helsinki, Finland (HUS1 and HUS2) were monitored for over nine weeks (weeks 25-33 in 2020) for a total of 216 antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), mobile genetic elements (MGEs), integrons, and taxonomy of bacteria, including bacteria causing hospital acquired infections, and the 16S rRNA gene using high-throughput quantitative PCR. The data from HT-qPCR was analysed and visualised using ResistApp. A higher number of ARGs and MGEs were detected at both hospitals in weeks 27-30 compared to other sampling weeks, with weeks 27-30 grouped separately from other sampling weeks by non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS)-ordination analysis. The NMDS ordination also indicated that the two hospitals, which use different amounts of antibiotics, had distinct resistance profiles. The study found that blaGES was the most abundant and prevalent carbapenem resistance gene in both hospitals throughout the sampling period. Low abundances of HAI-bacteria were detected in both hospitals. A correlation analysis was done, which revealed a positive association between blaGES and MGEs in both hospitals. Moreover, substantially more positive associations between carbapenem resistance genes and MGEs were found in HUS1 than HUS2, as well as a strong positive association between blaKPC and Klebsiella pneumoniae in the wastewater of HUS1. Wastewater monitoring with high-throughput qPCR is a promising tool for wastewater-based epidemiology, and it has been successfully used for the surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 -virus. Routine monitoring using ResistApp can capture both the impact of antibiotic use on resistance profiles and the dynamics of these profiles in hospital wastewater. In addition, ResistApp can simplify the analysis of HT-qPCR data considerably, compared to processing large amounts of raw data by hand.