SHRUB WILLOW BIOCHAR FOR MITIGATING ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE IN AGRICULTURAL SOIL

Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health challenge worldwide, and agricultural use of antimicrobials is one major contributor to the emergence and dissemination of antibiotic resistance. Globally, most antimicrobials are used in industrial food animal production, a major context for microbes encountering low-doses of antimicrobial agents from all mechanistic classes. This practice exerts broad eco-evolutionary effects on the environmental resistome, defined as all antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in a particular environment. Animal manure contains both low-dose antimicrobials and ARGs and when applied to soil, it drives the expansion of the soil resistome through mobile genetic elements-facilitated horizontal gene transfer (HGT). The soil resistome may re-enter humans through the food chain, thus posing a significant public health risk to humans. Many efforts have been devoted to track the movement of ARGs across agroecosystems and to quantify the associated risk of human exposure. Fewer, however, have focused on mitigating the dissemination of ARGs in soil, a challenging task due to widespread HGT in the microbial world.This project aims to address this challenge by using shrub willow biochar as a soil amendment, leveraging several state-of-the-art techniques including 3D printing of fabricated ecosystems, advanced microscopy, flow cytometry, and next generation sequencing. The successful completion of this project will provide novel insights into mitigating the dissemination of ARGs across agroecosystems. The new data generated from this project has the potential to be translated into new agronomic practices with a wide implication of agricultural sustainability and food safety.