Abstract
Environmental surveillance is recognized as an important tool for assessing public health in the post-pandemic era. Water, in particular wastewater, has emerged as the source of choice to sample pathogen burdens in the environment. Wastewater from open drains and community water treatment plants is a reservoir of both pathogens and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes, and frequently comes in contact with humans. While there are many methods of tracking AMR from water, isolating good-quality DNA at high yields from heterogeneous samples remains a challenge. To compensate, sample volumes often need to be high, creating practical constraints. Additionally, environmental DNA is frequently fragmented, and the sources of AMR (plasmids, phages, linear DNA) consist of low-molecular-weight DNA. Yet, few extraction processes have focused on methods for high-yield extraction of linear and low-molecular-weight DNA. Here, a simple method for high-yield linear DNA extraction from small volumes of wastewater using the precipitation properties of polyethylene glycol (PEG) is reported. This study makes a case for increasing overall DNA yields from water samples collected for metagenomic analyses by enriching the proportion of linear DNA. In addition, enhancing low-molecular-weight DNA overcomes the current problem of under-sampling environmental AMR due to a focus on high-molecular-weight and intracellular DNA. This method is expected to be particularly useful when extracellular DNA exists but at low concentrations, such as with effluents from treatment plants. It should also enhance the environmental sampling of AMR gene fragments that spread through horizontal gene transfer.
