Pulse Brain · Growing Health Evidence Index
Peer-reviewed

Soil microbial and plant responses to increasing antibiotic concentration: a case study of five antibiotics

Sarah van den Broek, Inna Nybom, Rafaela Feola Conz, Yifei Sun, Thomas D. Bucheli, Sebastian Döetterl, Martin Hartmann, Gina Garland

bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025

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Summary

Abstract Antibiotic contamination from biogenic waste in agricultural soils poses a significant threat to soil health and crop productivity. We investigated the effect of antibiotics on the soil microbial community, antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and mobile genetic elements (MGEs) and plant productivity in a six week greenhouse trial. Here, Spinacia oleracea (spinach) and Raphanus sativus (radish) were grown from seed and a mix of five antibiotics, namely sulfamethoxazole, trimethoprim, enrofloxacin, clarithromycin and chlortetracycline, were added to the soil at concentrations 0, 0.1, 1 and 10 mg kg −1 soil dry weight (c0, c0.1, c1 and c10, respectively). Overall, we found that the antibiotic treatments significantly impacted prokaryotic α-diversity and prokaryotic and fungal β-divers

Subject
Antimicrobial resistance
Source type
Peer-reviewed study
System type
Other
DOI
10.1101/2025.08.06.668893
Catalogue ID
SNmp2b1ums-vztipk
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