Finished project:

ANTIRES

A rapidly increasing threat is arising from new or resistant pathogens and their growing global circulation that affects all areas of human life. This threat is further afflicted with a drastic lack of (new) effective drugs as well as insufficient preventive and diagnostic possibilities.

The intense use of antibiotics (AB) in agriculture and human health care results in an increasing leakage of antibiotics into the environment - a disastrous trend that provokes the development of AB resistances and the distribution of multi-drug resistant pathogens. One of the major resources for the antibiotics are contaminated wastewaters. At present, our limited knowledge on the distribution of antibiotic resistances via contaminated wastewaters needs to be improved and strategies for risk estimation should be developed. ANTIRES investigates the existence of AB resistent microorganisms and the expression of AB resistance genes in municipal wastewaters using state-of-the-art MetaOmics techniques. The integration of microbiological and biochemical methods as well as the use of cutting-edge metagenome, metatranscriptome and metaproteome analyses will allow a better understanding of the degree of contamination with antibiotics, antibiotic resistant genes as well as antibiotic resistant organisms. The collected data and diagnostic methods will lead to a better understanding of the means of distribution of AB resistances in waterbodies as well as seasonal variations. The findings will be used for the development of a rapid chip based diagnostic tool and will be helpful for a better control of the spreading of AB resistances.