Antibiotics in my water and tomatoes?!

Antibiotic resistance in soil and tomato crops irrigated with freshwater and
two types of treated wastewater

by: Diana Tarver

Freshwater has become a scarce comodity for most farm lands as the demand has increased, a solution was to use municipally treated wastewater; problems arise when certain contaminants cannot be taken out of the water such as antibiotic resistant genes and antibiotics. The usage of treated wastewater on agriculture crops has made some concerned that the antibiotics will be taken up by the plants and local microbiome leading to highly resistant bacteria. Researchers Seyoum M. M. and colleagues (2022) sampled from 2 tomato farms with low growing tomatos, two irrigating with TWW and the other with FW, then tomatos are washed and collected as the results show in Figure 1.  that there was a higher amount of antibiotic resistant genes per 100mL in both secondary and teritary TWWs in the sample tomato farms using DNA extraction and PCR by selecting genes known to be ARGs. This goes to show how important it is to be concious of what we do with our treated wastewater as it can lead to more detrimental effects such as an outbreak of an antibiotic resistant bacteria found on lettuce that is all over the country affecting millions of people, this is a huge risk concidering how many antibiotics we currently have that still work against these antibiotic resistant bacteria. 

Original Article Citation:

Seyoum, M. M., Lichtenberg, R., Orlofsky, E., Bernstein, N., & Gillor, O. (2022). Antibiotic resistance in soil and tomato crop irrigated with freshwater and two types of treated wastewater. Environmental Research, 211, 113021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2022.113021