Effect of ozone–tea polyphenols as a drinking water disinfection process on antibiotic resistance genes

In recent years, the wide spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) has brought tremendous risk to the biological safety of drinking water. With the increasing demand for drinking water quality, ARGs have been regarded as a new pollutant that may cause serious public health problems. A large number of studies have shown that the disinfection process of drinking water treatment plants can remove ARGs. However, the effects of traditional disinfection methods on ARGs have their own disadvantages. Tea polyphenols have attracted more and more researchers’ attention as a green, efficient and non-disinfection by-products disinfectant. The effect of the ozone–tea polyphenols disinfection process on ARGs in filtered effluent of waterworks was analyzed by using metagenomic sequencing. The result shows that the ozone–tea polyphenols disinfection process is suitable for specific raw water containing more tetracycline, sulfonamide, β-lactam, and aminoglycoside resistance genes, and the removal rate of total resistance genes in water is higher than the traditional disinfection process. The effect of the ozone–tea polyphenols disinfection process on ARGs is to reduce the transfer of ARGs by destroying ARGs molecules and inhibiting the proliferation of ARGs host cells. As an assistant disinfectant, tea polyphenols have significance for the ability to remove ARGs during traditional disinfection.