Metagenomic strategies and methods for studying environmental resistome and its health risk

Abstract:

The development and spread of antibiotic resistance in the environment pose potential risks to human health. With the advances in high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics, metagenomics has been widely used in the study of antibiotic resistomes in different environmental samples. This paper introduces two metagenomic methods for environmental resistome screening, summarizes the current mainstream bioinformatic tools and databases, and describes the risk assessment framework of environmental resistome and the related practice based on metagenomic technology. We aim to provide a feasible roadmap for the monitoring, risk assessment, and control of environmental resistome.