Occurrence and distribution of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance genes in the different croplands along the Yellow River shoreline

Many antibiotics and their related antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) are found in agricultural soil, raising concerns for public and environmental health. As a result, it is crucial to examine the abundance of sulfonamides, fluoroquinolones, tetracyclines, macrolides, and β -lactam antibiotics and their corresponding ARGs in agricultural soils. We investigted the abundance of aad A, sul 1, aac (6’)-Ib, tet X, tet A, erm B, mph B, qnr A, int I1, int I2, and ISCR 1 genes and explore their relationships with antibiotics in rice, peach orchard, maize, peanut, and garlic croplands along the Yellow River in Zhongmu and Yuanyang, Henan Province. There was no significant difference across the five croplands (P > 0.05), however, the paddy field had the highest average concentration (>10 μ g kg ^−1 ) of oxytetracycline, tetracycline, ciprofloxacin and norfloxacin antibiotics. The predominant ARGs were aad A, sul 1, with the the highest number of ARGs and MGEs detected in paddy rice, followed by maize, peanut, garlic, and peach soils. Integrase gene int I1 was significantly greater than int I2 and ISCR 1, which was positively linked with sul 1, aad A, aac (6′)-Ib, tet A, tet X, and erm B genes (P < 0.05). According to redundancy analysis, antibiotics may accelerated the prevalence of ARGs. Redundancy analysis demonstrated that antibiotics contributed 78.7% of the total ARG variations. Notably, the concentration of oxytetracycline in all the croplands ranged from 10.33 to 14.42 μ g kg ^−1 , which had impacted the frequency of erm B, bla _CTX-M , int I2, and mph B genes as demonstrated by RDA analysis. Results revealed that effective techniques are required to lower the prevalence of ARGs in the agroecosystems.