What role do biocontrol agents with Mg play in the fate of antibiotic resistome and pathogenic bacteria in the phyllosphere?

Unlabelled: The contamination of the plant phyllosphere with antibiotics and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), caused by application of antibiotics, is a significant environmental issue in agricultural management. Alternatively, biocontrol agents are environmentally friendly and have attracted a lot of interest. However, the influence of biocontrol agents on the phyllosphere resistome remains unknown. In this study, we applied biocontrol agents to control the wildfire disease in the Solanaceae crops and investigated their effects on the resistome and the pathogen in the phyllosphere by using metagenomics. A total of 250 ARGs were detected from 15 samples, which showed a variation in distribution across treatments of biocontrol agents (BA), BA with Mg (T1), BA with Mn (T2), and kasugamycin (T3) and nontreated (CK). The results showed that the abundance of ARGs under the treatment of BA-Mg was lower than that in the CK group. The abundance of (carbapenem resistance), (carbapenem resistance), (tetracycline antibiotic resistance), and (aminoglycoside antibiotic resistance) in BA-Mg was significantly higher than that in BA-Mn ( < 0.05). The abundance of , and was significantly negatively related to the abundance of the phyllosphere pathogen ( < 0.05). We also found that the upstream and downstream regions of were relatively conserved, in which , and gene families were identified in most sequences (92%). The Ka/Ks of was 0 in all observed sequences, indicating that under the action of purifying selection, nonsynonymous substitutions are often gradually eliminated in the population. Overall, this study clarifies the effect of biocontrol agents with Mg on the distribution of the phyllosphere resistome and provides evolutionary insights into the biocontrol process.

Importance: Our study applied metagenomics analysis to examine the impact of biocontrol agents (BAs) on the phyllosphere resistome and the pathogen. Irregular use of antibiotics has led to the escalating dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in the environment. The majority of BA research has focused on the effect of monospecies on the plant disease control process, the role of the compound BA with nutrition elements in the phyllosphere disease, and the resistome is still unknown. We believe BAs are eco-friendly alternatives for antibiotics to combat the transfer of ARGs. Our results revealed that BA-Mg had a lower relative abundance of ARGs compared to the CK group, and the phyllosphere pathogen was negatively related to three specific ARGs, , and . These three genes also present different Ka/Ks. We believe that the identification of the distribution and evolution modes of ARGs further elucidates the ecological role and facilitates the development of BAs, which will attract general interest in this field.