-
Antibiotic resistance genes in livestock manure
Animal type is the strongest driver of antibiotic resistance genes in livestock manure. Across five species and four production stages, layer litter and pig manure carried the highest resistance gene diversity and abundance. Growth stage shifted the abundance of individual genes such as blaTEM, sul1, tet(Q) and tet(M) without changing the overall resistome structure. Of 944 subtypes found on DNA, only 579 were actively transcribed, and just 29 turned up at both levels. Why manure resistance is a food chain problem The global chicken population went from 14.7 billion to 33.1 billion between 2000 and 2020. That is roughly a 120 percent increase in two decades, and chickens are only…
-
Cutting Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Poultry Litter
Walk into a duck house on a dry-litter system and the floor looks like nothing much. Bedding, feathers, droppings, feed dust. It gets raked, topped up and mostly ignored until the next flock goes in. It is also one of the biggest reservoirs of resistance biology on the whole operation. A 2026 study that sequenced the virome of duck litter from four commercial farms has now put numbers on how much of that load you can strip out. Antibiotic resistance genes in poultry litter fell in a clean, repeatable order across four management groups, and the group that came out best is not the one most people would put money…
