Katerine Carrillo Castro

We present a global atlas of 4,728 metagenomic samples from mass-transit systems in 60 cities over 3 years, representing the first systematic, worldwide catalog of the urban microbial ecosystem. This atlas provides an annotated, geospatial profile of microbial strains, functional characteristics, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) markers, and genetic elements, including 10,928 viruses, 1,302 bacteria, 2 archaea, and 838,532 CRISPR arrays not found in reference databases. We identified 4,246 known species of urban microorganisms and a consistent set of 31 species found in 97% of samples that were distinct from human commensal organisms. Profiles of AMR genes varied widely in type and density across cities. Cities showed distinct microbial taxonomic signatures that were driven by climate and geographic differences. These results constitute a high-resolution global metagenomic atlas that enables discovery of organisms and genes, highlights potential public health and forensic applications, and provides a culture-independent view of AMR burden in cities

Se identificaron genes involucrados en la transformación y resistencia a arsénico en bacterias cultivables recuperadas de aguas y suelos provenientes de zonas de Colombia con presencia de arsénico. La identificación se realizó extrayendo ADN a partir de cepas recuperadas de muestras ambientales de la sabana de Bogotá y del municipio Agustín Codazzi del departamento del Cesar. Estos aislamientos se escogieron por su capacidad de crecer en medio con arsénico. Mediante el uso de la reacción en cadena de la polimerasa (PCR) se emplearon iniciadores reportados para amplificar dos de los genes del operón ars correspondientes a la bomba de expulsión de arsenito (ArsB) y la arsenato reductasa (ArsC), así como genes codificantes para la arsenito oxidasa (AroA/AsoA/AoxB). Se realizó una tipificación molecular de las cepas por medio de la amplificación del gen que codifica para la unidad ARN ribosomal 16S. Todos los productos de amplificación se discriminaron por análisis de Single-Strand Conf...

Bacillus licheniformis strain CG-B52 was isolated as the etiological agent producing a self-limited outbreak of high mortalities in commercial Litopenaeus vannamei culture ponds on the Colombian Caribbean coast in 2005. Here, we report its draft genome and three novel extrachromosomal elements that it harbors.