Microplastic-driven carbon availability differentiates phage-host interactions in shaping soil resistome.

Microplastics influence soil resistome by altering phage-host interactions through different carbon availabilities, with biodegradable MPs promoting transduction and nondegradable MPs enhancing bacterial fitness.

• Why it matters: Understanding how microplastics affect the spread of antibiotic resistance genes in soil ecosystems is critical for assessing environmental and public health risks, yet the mechanisms remain unclear.
• What they did: The study integrated multi-omics approaches and experimental validation to examine microbial responses to biodegradable and nondegradable microplastics in a long-term field experiment, focusing on ARG abundance, phage dynamics, and gene transfer mechanisms.
• The result: Both microplastic types increased ARG abundance and activity, with biodegradable MPs promoting lysogenic phage-mediated transduction via SOS response, and nondegradable MPs enriching bacteria with complex degradation genes and phages encoding auxiliary metabolic genes, facilitating ARG proliferation.