Recently, a collaborative research effort led by Professor Mu Dashuai’s team from the Marine College and the State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology at Shandong University, in partnership with research groups led by Researcher Wu Linwei from Peking University and Academician Jizhong Zhou from the University of Oklahoma, has led to a major breakthrough in the field of microbial ecology. The study, titled "Decade-Long Warming Accelerates Antibiotic Resistance in Grassland Soils," was published in the journal Nature. By integrating a decade-long field experiment with large-scale microbial isolation and cultivation, the research reveals how climate warming significantly accelerates the dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in soil environments through a coupled mechanism of ecological selection and evolution. This work provides critical scientific evidence for assessing public health risks associated with climate change from a "One Health" perspective.

Soils serve as critical reservoirs of ARGs, which are highly sensitive to environmental disturbances. While climate warming is recognized as a significant disturbance to microbial communities, its specific impact on soil resistomes has remained poorly understood. Determining the driving mechanisms behind these changes is a major challenge, requiring long-term, systematic experiments to establish causality.

The research team utilized an 11-year multifactor global change experiment to monitor ARG dynamics. The findings demonstrated that warming significantly increased total ARG abundance by 23.9%. The study identified "genetic hitchhiking" as a primary evolutionary driver for this expansion. Because ARGs are often physically linked to adaptive traits—such as thermal tolerance and nitrogen assimilation—on bacterial chromosomes, the positive selection pressure from warming promotes the co-selection and proliferation of these resistance genes.

A cornerstone of this collaboration was the integration of genotypic approaches with unprecedented large-scale phenotypic assays. The team isolated over 2,000 bacterial strains and performed antimicrobial susceptibility tests on representative isolates against 22 different antibiotics. This rigorous validation process generated more than 25,000 measurements, confirming that bacteria from warmed plots exhibited significantly higher resistance levels, thereby providing robust functional evidence for the genomic patterns observed.

Professor Mu Dashuai is the co-first author of the paper. His team was responsible for the critical phenotypic validation work, participating in the large-scale isolation and cultivation of soil microorganisms, resistance phenotype determination, and mechanistic analysis. Researcher Wu Linwei and Academician Jizhong Zhou are the co-corresponding authors.

Additional contributors from Shandong University include Dr. An Jing, Master’s student Wang Yanan, and Postdoctoral fellow Lu Dechen from the Marine College, as well as Professor Tu Qichao from the Institute of Marine Science and Technology. Professor James M. Tiedje from Michigan State University provided instructional guidance during the writing process. This research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. This milestone achievement significantly strengthens the university's research foundation in bio-safety and ecological civilization as part of its strategic development goals.