Environmental Emerging Contaminants Drive Bacterial Antimicrobial Resistance Evolution: Evidence, Mechanisms, and Challenges

Xinrui Yang; Qingbin Yuan; Yaru Dai; Xiaolong Wang; Zhigang Yu; Mengxiong Wu; Yi Luo

doi:10.53941/ges.2026.100028

Highlights

Emerging contaminants can drive antimicrobial resistance evolution in environmental systems
Antibiotics, EDCs, POPs, and microplastics exhibit distinct AMR-driving potentials
Four mechanisms link emerging contaminants to AMR evolution and dissemination
Multi-omics, modeling, and AI will advance contaminant-driven AMR risk assessment and management

Abstract

Antimicrobial resistance in the environment has become a major challenge to global public health. In addition to antibiotics themselves, emerging contaminants such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), persistent organic pollutants (POPs), and microplastics also significantly influence the emergence, evolution, and dissemination of bacterial antimicrobial resistance. This systematic review, based on a structured literature search, first summarizes current evidence linking emerging contaminants to bacterial antimicrobial resistance across diverse environmental matrices. It also provides a mechanistic analysis of four major pathways by which emerging contaminants promote antimicrobial resistance evolution: ROS–SOS-mediated adaptive evolution, enhanced horizontal gene transfer (HGT), selective enrichment of resistant bacteria, and microplastic-mediated migration and dissemination of antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs). Finally, we highlight current knowledge gaps and propose future research directions, including long-term field investigations, multi-omics approaches, experiment–model integration, and artificial intelligence-assisted analyses, to establish a cross-scale framework for understanding emerging contaminant-driven antimicrobial resistance evolution. This review provides new mechanistic insights into the environmental evolution of bacterial antimicrobial resistance and offers a theoretical foundation for environmental risk assessment and pollution control of emerging contaminants.

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