Review reveals the human gut microbiota acts as a major reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes, highlighting public health risks from horizontal transfer to pathogens.
The human gut microbiota represents one of the largest microbial ecosystems in the human body and functions not only as a physiological community but also as a substantial reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), collectively referred to as the gut resistome. The presence of ARGs in commensal bacteria is not necessarily equivalent to clinical antibiotic resistance; however, mobile resistance determinants can become epidemiologically important when they are associated with mobile genetic elements and are transferred to pathogenic bacteria.
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Akmalovich et al. (2026) studied this question.
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