Integrated cross-sectoral surveillance of antimicrobial resistance genotypes and phenotypes across disparate reservoirs.

Integrated surveillance combining multiple methods reveals extensive antimicrobial resistance across human, animal, and environmental reservoirs, with wastewater showing high AMR gene prevalence.

• Why it matters: Fragmented surveillance hampers efforts to track and disrupt the transmission of AMR among interconnected reservoirs, risking ineffective interventions and unchecked spread.
• What they did: Applying three complementary approaches—qPCR arrays, metagenomics, and culture-based genomics—to 1,032 genomes and thousands of AMR genes across diverse sample types in urban and agricultural settings.
• The result: This unified framework uncovers diverse resistance mechanisms, highlights wastewater as a key reservoir, and emphasizes that multiple methods are essential to fully understand and monitor AMR complexity.