Study of Occurrence Characteristics of Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Pig manure during Anaerobic Digestion and Digestate Fertilization

State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

^a Corresponding author: jiane.zuo@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn

Abstract

Antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) existing in livestock and poultry manure have the risk to spread and proliferate. This might endanger people’s health. The common treatment of livestock and poultry manure is anaerobic digestion. But the change of ARGs during anaerobic digestion require further study, and the effect of digestate fertilization to the antibiotic resistance of cropland soil is still unclear. This study investigated the pig manure, biogas liquid, biogas residue, and cropland soils fertilized with and without digestate. The results showed that, the relative abundance of ARGs in biogas residue was much higher than other samples. The average relative abundance was 1.46×10^-1 copy ratio (copy of ARG/copy of 16S rRNA gene), and the total relative abundance was 3.07 copy ratio. There were 21 ARGs detected in the 5 samples. 11 of them were shared by the 5 samples. The main ARGs were aminoglycoside, chloramphenicol, sulfonamide, tetracycline, and multidrug. Aminoglycoside had the highest relative abundance, and the total relative abundance in all samples was 1.18 copy ratio. Anaerobic digestion increased the total relative abundance of ARGs in pig manure from 1.14×10^-1 to 1.70×10^-1 copy ratio. Fertilization of digestate increased the total relative abundance of AGRs in soil from 3.27×10^-1 to 7.29×10^-1 copy ratio.