# | Rank | Similarity | Title + Abs. | Year | PMID |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| 6440 | 0 | 0.9973 | Fate and transport of biological microcontaminants bound to microplastics in the soil environment. Microplastics, fragmented plastic particles with a maximum dimension <5 mm, are an emerging contaminant of concern that can also serve as a vector of other chemical and biological contaminants. Compared to chemical contaminants, the potential of microplastics to adsorb biological microcontaminants such as antibiotic resistance genes, small interference RNAs, and pathogenic viruses is not well understood. Many current microplastic studies are based in the aquatic environment (freshwater, seawater, and wastewater), even though the terrestrial environment is considered both an important sink and source of microplastics. Microplastics co-occur with biological microcontaminants in many terrestrial environments including agricultural soils, where biosolids containing both contaminants are often applied as a soil amendment. Recent research suggests that microplastics in these environments can increase gene persistence and flow, which could have unintended downstream consequences for environmental microbiome health and resilience. Antibiotic resistance genes and silencing RNAs bound to microplastics, for example, have the potential to increase resistance and alter gene expression in environmental bacteria, respectively. This review evaluates the sources and pathways of microplastics and biological microcontaminants in the terrestrial environment as well as potential sorption mechanisms that can encourage long-range transport and persistence. Novel sources of biological microcontaminants are considered, and the role of microplastics in promoting the persistence and flow of biological microcontaminants evaluated. Finally, future research directions are suggested to increase understanding of the mechanisms that drive the fate and transport of microplastic-biological microcontaminant complexes in the terrestrial environment and better inform risk management. | 2023 | 37247742 |
| 6449 | 1 | 0.9972 | Microbial regulation of natural antibiotic resistance: Understanding the protist-bacteria interactions for evolution of soil resistome. The emergence, evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in the environment represent a global threat to human health. Our knowledge of antibiotic resistance in human-impacted ecosystems is rapidly growing with antibiotic use, organic fertilization and wastewater irrigation identified as key selection pressures. However, the importance of biological interactions, especially predation and competition, as a potential driver of antibiotic resistance in the natural environment with limited anthropogenic disturbance remains largely overlooked. Stress-affected bacteria develop resistance to maximize competition and survival, and similarly bacteria may develop resistance to fight stress under the predation pressure of protists, an essential component of the soil microbiome. In this article, we summarized the major findings for the prevalence of natural ARGs on our planet and discussed the potential selection pressures driving the evolution and development of antibiotic resistance in natural settings. This is the first article that reviewed the potential links between protists and the antibiotic resistance of bacteria, and highlighted the importance of predation by protists as a crucial selection pressure of antibiotic resistance in the absence of anthropogenic disturbance. We conclude that an improved ecological understanding of the protists-bacteria interactions and other biological relationships would greatly expand our ability to predict and mitigate the environmental antibiotic resistance under the context of global change. | 2020 | 31818598 |
| 8625 | 2 | 0.9972 | Marine viruses: truth or dare. Over the past two decades, marine virology has progressed from a curiosity to an intensely studied topic of critical importance to oceanography. At concentrations of approximately 10 million viruses per milliliter of surface seawater, viruses are the most abundant biological entities in the oceans. The majority of these viruses are phages (viruses that infect bacteria). Through lysing their bacterial hosts, marine phages control bacterial abundance, affect community composition, and impact global biogeochemical cycles. In addition, phages influence their hosts through selection for resistance, horizontal gene transfer, and manipulation of bacterial metabolism. Recent work has also demonstrated that marine phages are extremely diverse and can carry a variety of auxiliary metabolic genes encoding critical ecological functions. This review is structured as a scientific "truth or dare," revealing several well-established "truths" about marine viruses and presenting a few "dares" for the research community to undertake in future studies. | 2012 | 22457982 |
| 9583 | 3 | 0.9972 | Bacteriophages presence in nature and their role in the natural selection of bacterial populations. Phages are the obligate parasite of bacteria and have complex interactions with their hosts. Phages can live in, modify, and shape bacterial communities by bringing about changes in their abundance, diversity, physiology, and virulence. In addition, phages mediate lateral gene transfer, modify host metabolism and reallocate bacterially-derived biochemical compounds through cell lysis, thus playing an important role in ecosystem. Phages coexist and coevolve with bacteria and have developed several antidefense mechanisms in response to bacterial defense strategies against them. Phages owe their existence to their bacterial hosts, therefore they bring about alterations in their host genomes by transferring resistance genes and genes encoding toxins in order to improve the fitness of the hosts. Application of phages in biotechnology, environment, agriculture and medicines demands a deep insight into the myriad of phage-bacteria interactions. However, to understand their complex interactions, we need to know how unique phages are to their bacterial hosts and how they exert a selective pressure on the microbial communities in nature. Consequently, the present review focuses on phage biology with respect to natural selection of bacterial populations. | 2020 | 33170167 |
| 6438 | 4 | 0.9972 | The influence of heavy metals, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, and polychlorinated biphenyls pollution on the development of antibiotic resistance in soils. The minireview is devoted to the analysis of the influence of soil pollution with heavy metals, polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) on the distribution of antibiotics resistance genes (ARGs) in soil microbiomes. It is shown that the best understanding of ARGs distribution process requires studying the influence of pollutants on this process in natural microbiocenoses. Heavy metals promote co-selection of genes determining resistance to them together with ARGs in the same mobile elements of a bacterial genome, but the majority of studies focus on agricultural soils enriched with ARGs originating from manure. Studying nonagricultural soils would clear mechanisms of ARGs transfer in natural and anthropogenically transformed environments and highlight the role of antibiotic-producing bacteria. PAHs make a considerable shift in soil microbiomes leading to an increase in the number of Actinobacteria which are the source of antibiotics formation and bear multiple ARGs. The soils polluted with PAHs can be a selective medium for bacteria resistant to antibiotics, and the level of ARGs expression is much higher. PCBs are accumulated in soils and significantly alter the specific structure of soil microbiocenoses. In such soils, representatives of the genera Acinetobacter, Pseudomonas, and Alcanivorax dominate, and the ability to degrade PCBs is connected to horizontal gene transfer (HGT) and high level of genomic plasticity. The attention is also focused on the need to study the properties of the soil having an impact on the bioavailability of pollutants and, as a result, on resistome of soil microorganisms. | 2018 | 29453715 |
| 8635 | 5 | 0.9972 | Techniques for enhancing the tolerance of industrial microbes to abiotic stresses: A review. The diversity of stress responses and survival strategies evolved by microorganism enables them to survive and reproduce in a multitude of harsh environments, whereas the discovery of the underlying resistance genes or mechanisms laid the foundation for the directional enhancement of microbial tolerance to abiotic stresses encountered in industrial applications. Many biological techniques have been developed for improving the stress resistance of industrial microorganisms, which greatly benefited the bacteria on which industrial production is based. This review introduces the main techniques for enhancing the resistance of microorganisms to abiotic stresses, including evolutionary engineering, metabolic engineering, and process engineering, developed in recent years. In addition, we also discuss problems that are still present in this area and offer directions for future research. | 2020 | 31206805 |
| 6417 | 6 | 0.9972 | Fate of environmental pollutants: A review. A review of the literature published in 2019 on topics associated with the fate of environmental pollutants is presented. Environmental pollutants covered include pharmaceuticals, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and genes, pesticides and veterinary medicines, personal care products and emerging pollutants, PFAS, microplastics, nanomaterials, heavy metals and radionuclides, nutrients, pathogens and indicator organisms, and oil and hydrocarbons. For each pollutant, the occurrence in the environment and/or their fate in engineered as well as natural systems in matrices including water, soil, wastewater, stormwater, runoff, and/or manure is presented based on the published literature. The review includes current developments in understanding pollutants in natural and engineered systems, and relevant physico-chemical processes, as well as biological processes. | 2020 | 32671926 |
| 8633 | 7 | 0.9972 | Bacterial interactions with arsenic: Metabolic pathways, resistance mechanisms, and bioremediation approaches. Arsenic contamination in natural waters is one of the biggest threats to human health, mainly due to its carcinogenic potential. Given its toxicity, nearly all organisms have evolved to develop an arsenic resistance mechanism. Conventional techniques of arsenic remediation suffer from various limitations of their applicability, cost and/or chemical intensive nature. In past few decades, bioremediation has emerged as a potential alternative to the conventional techniques. Microbial bioremediation, bacteria in particular, offers an eco-friendly and sustainable alternative, owing to its inherent metabolic capabilities to transform, immobilize or volatilize arsenic. Diverse biochemical pathways involving oxidation of As(III) to As(V), reduction of As(V) under anaerobic respiration or detoxification, methylation and demethylation, bioleaching and biomineralization into insoluble forms are essential mechanisms for arsenic remediation. These transformations, detoxification and resistance are regulated by specific genetic systems, including the ars operon, aio, arr and arsM, accessory genes such as arsR, arsB, acr3, arsC and arsP. The metabolic regulation of arsenic detoxification involves complex cofactor-dependent enzyme systems and environmental signal-responsive transcriptional control. Integrated approaches such as immobilization of bacteria on biochar or their encapsulation have also been known to enhance stability, reusability and stress tolerance. However, bioremediation is a very complex process due to the interrelationship of various influences such as, presence of specific microorganisms, nutrients and environmental factors. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to understand the bacterial interactions with arsenic for the development of bioremediation technologies. This review article tries to discuss the current status of arsenic bioremediation using bacteria, its field applications, challenges and future perspectives. It also includes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis to assess the merits and demerits of using bacteria for bioremediation of arsenic. | 2025 | 41043264 |
| 9580 | 8 | 0.9972 | Antibiotic resistance in bacterial communities. Bacteria are single-celled organisms, but the survival of microbial communities relies on complex dynamics at the molecular, cellular, and ecosystem scales. Antibiotic resistance, in particular, is not just a property of individual bacteria or even single-strain populations, but depends heavily on the community context. Collective community dynamics can lead to counterintuitive eco-evolutionary effects like survival of less resistant bacterial populations, slowing of resistance evolution, or population collapse, yet these surprising behaviors are often captured by simple mathematical models. In this review, we highlight recent progress - in many cases, advances driven by elegant combinations of quantitative experiments and theoretical models - in understanding how interactions between bacteria and with the environment affect antibiotic resistance, from single-species populations to multispecies communities embedded in an ecosystem. | 2023 | 37054512 |
| 6439 | 9 | 0.9972 | A review: Marine aquaculture impacts marine microbial communities. Marine aquaculture is key for protein production but disrupts marine ecosystems by releasing excess feed and pharmaceuticals, thus affecting marine microbes. Though vital, its environmental impact often remains overlooked. This article delves into mariculture's effects on marine microbes, including bacteria, fungi, viruses, and antibiotic-resistance genes in seawater and sediments. It highlights how different mariculture practices-open, pond, and cage culture-affect these microbial communities. Mariculture's release of nutrients, antibiotics, and heavy metals alters the microbial composition, diversity, and functions. Integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, a promising sustainable approach, is still developing and needs refinement. A deep understanding of mariculture's impact on microbial ecosystems is crucial to minimize pollution and foster sustainable practices, paving the way for the industry's sustainable advancement. | 2024 | 38919720 |
| 9728 | 10 | 0.9971 | Metagenomic analysis of metal(loid)s resistance genes and its environmental applications. Heavy metals are widely used to satiate the demands of growing industrialization and modern life. However, the presence of metal in large quantities in the ecosystem significantly impacts all life forms, particularly microorganisms. Many bacterial strains have developed metal resistance genes (MRG) to survive in extreme conditions through various mechanisms, such as active efflux, sequestration, permeability barriers, or co-resistance with antibiotic resistance genes. Metagenomic analysis is a powerful approach that enables the exploration of the functional repertoire and diversity of microorganisms, providing deeper insights into the mechanisms underlying the development of MRGs, and the active metabolites they produce to adapt to the polluted environments. With the advancement of these techniques, the knowledge can be further applied to environmental applications, such as bioremediation, biomonitoring, and synthetic biology. Bacteria with metal toxicity tolerance can be employed to enhance environmental sustainability and mitigate potential hazards. | 2025 | 40992856 |
| 8647 | 11 | 0.9971 | Eco-evolutionary strategies for relieving carbon limitation under salt stress differ across microbial clades. With the continuous expansion of saline soils under climate change, understanding the eco-evolutionary tradeoff between the microbial mitigation of carbon limitation and the maintenance of functional traits in saline soils represents a significant knowledge gap in predicting future soil health and ecological function. Through shotgun metagenomic sequencing of coastal soils along a salinity gradient, we show contrasting eco-evolutionary directions of soil bacteria and archaea that manifest in changes to genome size and the functional potential of the soil microbiome. In salt environments with high carbon requirements, bacteria exhibit reduced genome sizes associated with a depletion of metabolic genes, while archaea display larger genomes and enrichment of salt-resistance, metabolic, and carbon-acquisition genes. This suggests that bacteria conserve energy through genome streamlining when facing salt stress, while archaea invest in carbon-acquisition pathways to broaden their resource usage. These findings suggest divergent directions in eco-evolutionary adaptations to soil saline stress amongst microbial clades and serve as a foundation for understanding the response of soil microbiomes to escalating climate change. | 2024 | 39019914 |
| 8631 | 12 | 0.9971 | Bacterial metal(loid) resistance genes (MRGs) and their variation and application in environment: A review. Toxic metal(loid)s are widespread and permanent in the biosphere, and bacteria have evolved a wide variety of metal(loid) resistance genes (MRGs) to resist the stress of excess metal(loid)s. Via active efflux, permeability barriers, extracellular/intracellular sequestration, enzymatic detoxification and reduction in metal(loid)s sensitivity of cellular targets, the key components of bacterial cells are protected from toxic metal(loid)s to maintain their normal physiological functions. Exploiting bacterial metal(loid) resistance mechanisms, MRGs have been applied in many environmental fields. Based on the specific binding ability of MRGs-encoded regulators to metal(loid)s, MRGs-dependent biosensors for monitoring environmental metal(loid)s are developed. MRGs-related biotechnologies have been applied to environmental remediation of metal(loid)s by using the metal(loid) tolerance, biotransformation, and biopassivation abilities of MRGs-carrying microorganisms. In this work, we review the historical evolution, resistance mechanisms, environmental variation, and environmental applications of bacterial MRGs. The potential hazards, unresolved problems, and future research directions are also discussed. | 2023 | 36758696 |
| 8630 | 13 | 0.9971 | Environmental fate and behaviour of antibiotic resistance genes and small interference RNAs released from genetically modified crops. Rising global populations have amplified food scarcity across the world and ushered in the development of genetically modified (GM) crops to overcome these challenges. Cultivation of major crops such as corn and soy has favoured GM crops over conventional varieties to meet crop production and resilience needs. Modern GM crops containing small interference RNA molecules and antibiotic resistance genes have become increasingly common in the United States. However, the use of these crops remains controversial due to the uncertainty regarding the unintended release of its genetic material into the environment and possible downstream effects on human and environmental health. DNA or RNA transgenes may be exuded from crop tissues during cultivation or released during plant decomposition and adsorbed by soil. This can contribute to the persistence and bioavailability in soil or water environment and possible uptake by soil microbial communities and further passing of this information to neighbouring bacteria, disrupting microbial ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling and soil fertility. In this review, transgene mechanisms of action, uses in crops, and knowledge regarding their environmental fate and impact to microbes are evaluated. This aims to encapsulate the current knowledge and promote further research regarding unintended effects transgenes may cause. | 2022 | 35892194 |
| 6443 | 14 | 0.9970 | Understanding bacterial ecology to combat antibiotic resistance dissemination. The dissemination of antibiotic resistance from environmental sources is a growing concern. Despite the widespread occurrence of antibiotic resistance transmission events, there are actually multiple obstacles in the ecosystem that restrict the flow of bacteria and genes, in particular nonnegligible biological barriers. How these ecological factors help combat the dissemination of antibiotic resistance and relevant antibiotic resistance-diminishing organisms (ARDOs) deserves further exploration. This review summarizes the factors that influence the growth, metabolism, and environmental adaptation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) and restrict the horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). Additionally, this review discusses the achievements in the application of ARDOs to improve biotechnology for wastewater and solid waste remediation while highlighting current challenges limiting their broader implementation. | 2025 | 39855970 |
| 9727 | 15 | 0.9970 | Metal Toxicity and Resistance in Plants and Microorganisms in Terrestrial Ecosystems. Metals are major abiotic stressors of many organisms, but their toxicity in plants is not as studied as in microorganisms and animals. Likewise, research in plant responses to metal contamination is sketchy. Candidate genes associated with metal resistance in plants have been recently discovered and characterized. Some mechanisms of plant adaptation to metal stressors have been now decrypted. New knowledge on microbial reaction to metal contamination and the relationship between bacterial, archaeal, and fungal resistance to metals has broadened our understanding of metal homeostasis in living organisms. Recent reviews on metal toxicity and resistance mechanisms focused only on the role of transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and ionomics. This review is a critical analysis of key findings on physiological and genetic processes in plants and microorganisms in responses to soil metal contaminations. | 2020 | 30725190 |
| 8634 | 16 | 0.9970 | Synthetic bacteria designed using ars operons: a promising solution for arsenic biosensing and bioremediation. The global concern over arsenic contamination in water due to its natural occurrence and human activities has led to the development of innovative solutions for its detection and remediation. Microbial metabolism and mobilization play crucial roles in the global cycle of arsenic. Many microbial arsenic-resistance systems, especially the ars operons, prevalent in bacterial plasmids and genomes, play vital roles in arsenic resistance and are utilized as templates for designing synthetic bacteria. This review novelty focuses on the use of these tailored bacteria, engineered with ars operons, for arsenic biosensing and bioremediation. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using synthetic bacteria in arsenic pollution treatment. We highlight the importance of genetic circuit design, reporter development, and chassis cell optimization to improve biosensors' performance. Bacterial arsenic resistances involving several processes, such as uptake, transformation, and methylation, engineered in customized bacteria have been summarized for arsenic bioaccumulation, detoxification, and biosorption. In this review, we present recent insights on the use of synthetic bacteria designed with ars operons for developing tailored bacteria for controlling arsenic pollution, offering a promising avenue for future research and application in environmental protection. | 2024 | 38709285 |
| 6396 | 17 | 0.9970 | Interaction between microplastic biofilm formation and antibiotics: Effect of microplastic biofilm and its driving mechanisms on antibiotic resistance gene. As two pollutants with similar transport pathways, microplastics (MPs) and antibiotics (ATs) inevitably co-exist in water environments, and their interaction has become a topic of intense research interest for scholars over the past few years. This paper comprehensively and systematically reviews the current interaction between MPs and ATs, in particular, the role played by biofilm developed MPs (microplastic biofilm). A summary of the formation process of microplastic biofilm and its unique microbial community structure is presented in the paper. The formation of microplastic biofilm can enhance the adsorption mechanisms of ATs on primary MPs. Moreover, microplastic biofilm system is a diverse and vast reservoir of genetic material, and this paper reviews the mechanisms by which microplastics with biofilm drive the production of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and the processes that selectively enrich for more ARGs. Meanwhile, the enrichment of ARGs may lead to the development of microbial resistance and the gradual loss of the antimicrobial effect of ATs. The transfer pathways of ARGs affected by microplastic biofilm are outlined, and ARGs dependent transfer of antibiotic resistance bacteria (ARB) is mainly through horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Furthermore, the ecological implications of the interaction between microplastic biofilm and ATs and perspectives for future research are reviewed. This review contributes to a new insight into the aquatic ecological environmental risks and the fate of contaminants (MPs, ATs), and is of great significance for controlling the combined pollution of these two pollutants. | 2023 | 37517232 |
| 9371 | 18 | 0.9970 | Coevolutionary history of predation constrains the evolvability of antibiotic resistance in prey bacteria. Understanding how the historical contingency of biotic interactions shapes the evolvability of bacterial populations is imperative for the predictability of the eco-evolutionary dynamics of microbial communities. While microbial predators like Myxococcus xanthus influence the frequency of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in nature, the effect of adaptation to the presence of predators on the evolvability of prey bacteria to future stressors is unclear. Hence, to understand the influence of the coevolutionary history of predation on the evolvability of antibiotic resistance, we propagated variants of E. coli, pre-adapted to distinct biotic and abiotic conditions, in gradually increasing concentrations of antibiotics. We show that pre-adaptation to predators limits the evolution of a high degree of antibiotic resistance. Moreover, lower degree of resistance in the evolved strains also incurs reduced fitness costs while preserving their ancestral ability to resist predation. Together, we demonstrate that the history of biotic interactions can strongly influence the evolvability of bacteria. | 2025 | 40461734 |
| 8632 | 19 | 0.9970 | Microbial interactions in the arsenic cycle: adoptive strategies and applications in environmental management. Arsenic (As) is a nonessential element that is often present in plants and in other organisms. However, it is one of the most hazardous of toxic elements globally. In many parts of the world, arsenic contamination in groundwater is a serious and continuing threat to human health. Microbes play an important role in regulating the environmental fate of arsenic. Different microbial processes influence the biogeochemical cycling of arsenic in ways that affect the accumulation of different arsenic species in various ecosystem compartments. For example, in soil, there are bacteria that methylate arsenite to trimethylarsine gas, thereby releasing arsenic to the atmosphere.In marine ecosystems, microbes exist that can convert inorganic arsenicals to organic arsenicals (e.g., di- and tri-methylated arsenic derivatives, arsenocholine,arsenobetaine, arsenosugars, arsenolipids). The organo arsenicals are further metabolized to complete the arsenic cycle.Microbes have developed various strategies that enable them to tolerate arsenic and to survive in arsenic-rich environments. Such strategies include As exclusion from cells by establishing permeability barrier, intra- and extracellular sequestration,active efflux pumps, enzymatic reduction, and reduction in the sensitivity of cellular targets. These strategies are used either singly or in combination. In bacteria,the genes for arsenic resistance/detoxification are encoded by the arsenic resistance operons (ars operon).In this review, we have addressed and emphasized the impact of different microbial processes (e.g., arsenite oxidation, cytoplasmic arsenate reduction, respiratory arsenate reduction, arsenite methylation) on the arsenic cycle. Microbes are the only life forms reported to exist in heavy arsenic-contaminated environments. Therefore,an understanding of the strategies adopted by microbes to cope with arsenic stress is important in managing such arsenic-contaminated sites. Further future insights into the different microbial genes/proteins that are involved in arsenic resistance may also be useful for developing arsenic resistant crop plants. | 2013 | 23232917 |