MOSCOW, April 8Bioproducts grown without the use of pesticides and synthetic “bait” can cause resistance to antibiotics in bacteria no less than products grown traditionally using mineral fertilizers. Scientists from Tyumen State University came to this conclusion. The results are presented in Soil Ecology Letters.
Antibiotics are medicines used to prevent and treat infections in humans, animals and plants. WHO named resistance to these drugs as one of the ten global threats to public health around the world.
Earlier in an interview, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, head of the laboratory of healthcare-associated infections at the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology of Rospotrebnadzor, Alexey Tutelyan, stated that “the root of the problem of drug resistance lies in the irrational use of antibiotics in the agricultural sector.”
< br />Scientists from Tyumen State University (TSU) examined the soil of organic and traditional fields in the Rostov region. One site was used to grow organic spelled (a wild type of wheat). Organic products are agricultural and food industry products made without the use of synthetic pesticides, mineral fertilizers, growth regulators, and artificial food additives. Such products are considered healthier by consumers and are more expensive than traditionally grown ones.
In the second field, the soil of which was studied by Tyumen scientists, wheat was grown in the traditional way of farming using chemical fertilizers and plant protection products against pests.
Having compared the microbiome of the two plots, the scientists came to the conclusion that “clean” farming brings no less benefits to consumers risk of obtaining antibiotic-resistant bacteria than «dirty».
«We isolated the DNA of microorganisms from soil samples, analyzed their composition and assessed the resistome — a set of antibiotic resistance genes. It turned out that the resistome is almost the same, we did not find any significant differences between the fields, there are minor deviations everywhere: somewhere there are more genes for resistance to certain antibiotics, somewhere else,” said Alexey Vasilchenko, head of the laboratory of antimicrobial resistance at the X-Bio Institute of Tyumen State University, adding that in total resistance genes to more than 20 classes of antibiotics were found.
For example, according to him, in the soil of an organic field there were significantly more copies of genes for resistance to tetracyclines and quinolones, and in the soil of a traditional field more genes for resistance to beta-lactams and multi-resistance genes were identified.
«Bacterial biodiversity in two areas was the same, but the enzymatic activity of the soil turned out to be higher in the conventional (traditional) field, where nitrogen fertilizers were used to grow wheat,” the scientist noted, explaining that mineral fertilizers change the qualitative composition of the soil microbiome and, accordingly, increase its activity.
“In the short term, mineral fertilizers are a kind of booster for the microbiome, which has a beneficial effect on fertility, but in the long term it leads to soil depletion due to erosion processes,” he added.
The scientist made an analogy with an athlete on steroids and an exerciser .
«An athlete, as a rule, is in good health: he has no sports injuries, he can maintain his physical fitness at a high level for decades. However, he will never run a hundred meters in a record time and will not lift record weight. Meanwhile, an athlete who uses doping will produce results at an order of magnitude different level, but a sports career is not a long-term phenomenon due to wear and tear on the body and sports injuries. It’s the same with soil: mineral fertilizers increase productivity, but lead to depletion of soil resources «, the scientist summarized.
Tyumen State University is a participant in the state program of strategic academic leadership «Priority 2030», within the framework of which the university is implementing the strategic project «Biosafe World».