The unintended consequences of a surge in antibiotic resistance when removing wastewater drain biofilm

The prevalence and proliferation of antimicrobial resistant bacteria is considered one of the critical issues of our time. Wastewater is a habitat for complex microbial communities where bacteria share genes of antimicrobial resistance through horizontal gene transfer. Hospital wastewater drainage systems are an ideal reservoir for environmental and pathogenic bacteria to interface and exchange genes of antimicrobial resistance1. Highly resistant Enterobacterales are of the greatest concern because they not only cause human infections but can also thrive in the environment2,3 and have shown to transmit from sink drains to patients4. Replacement of contaminated plumbing may be the most intuitive and widely deployed response once highly resistant potentially pathogenic bacteria are identified in a sink drain. Here we show using shotgun metagenomic sequencing of sink drain biofilms (in 6 intensive care patient rooms, 36 subsamples) paired with microbial culture analysis, an evident shift of biofilm community structure towards increased abundance of Enterobacteriaceae in the newly replaced sink plumbing. Significant increase in resistome load and abundance of clinically relevant resistance and typically mobile genes in the newly replaced plumbing was also observed. Findings from this study demonstrate that exchanging contaminated plumbing for new plumbing may actually have the unexpected consequence of increased abundance of Enterobacterales and genes of antimicrobial resistance in the sink drains. Disruption of preexisting complex environmental biofilms may result in an unintended increase in the amount of antimicrobial resistant Enterobacterales which are targeted for elimination. Temporal variability is an important attribute of ecosystems affecting colonization dynamics and biotic interactions (composition of introduced and resident communities) are key to functional outcomes. Absence of competition within an ecosystem favors invasion.