Microbial degradation of antibiotic: future possibility of mitigating antibiotic pollution

Antibiotics are the major pharmaceutical wastes that are being exposed to the environment from the pharmaceutical industries and for the anthropogenic activities. The use of antibiotics for disease prevention and treatment in humans has been surpassed by the amount used in agriculture, particularly on livestock. It is stipulated that the overuse of antibiotics is the single largest reason behind the rise of bacterial anti-microbial resistance (AMR). The development of alternative therapy, like gene therapy, immunotherapy, use of natural products, and various nanoparticles, to control bacterial pathogens might be an alternative of antibiotics for mankind but the remediation of already exposed antibiotics from the lithosphere and hydrosphere needs to be envisioned with priority. The ever-increasing release of antibiotics in the environment makes it one of the major emerging contaminants (ECs). Decomposition of such antibiotic contaminants is a great challenge to get a cleaner environment. There are reports describing the degradation of antibiotics by photolysis, hydrolysis, using cathode and metal salts, or by degradation via microbes. Antimicrobials like sulfonamides are recalcitrant to natural biodegradation, exhibiting high thermal stability. There are recent reports on microbial degradation of a few common antibiotics and their derivatives but their applications in waste management are scanty. It could however be a major concern to the scientists whether to use the antibiotic degradation traits of a microbe for the removal of antibiotic wastes. The complexity of the genetic clusters of a microbe that are responsible for degradation is crucial, as a small genetic cluster might have higher chance of horizontal transfer into sensitive species of the normal microbial flora that in turn triggers the rise of antimicrobial resistance.