Metagenomicc Profiling of Drinking Water Microbiomes: Insights into Microbial Diversity and Antimicrobial Resistance

Monitoring microbial components in drinking water is as essential as tracking its chemical composition. While traditional culture-based methods can offer valuable insights into the morphology, behavior, and phenotype of organisms, their scope is limited to culturable species. With the advent of high-throughput sequencing, we can now detect a wider range of microbes in any ecosystem, gaining deeper insights into their functional potential and metabolic capabilities more efficiently. In this study, we employed metagenomic analysis to gain a comprehensive understanding of the microbiome of drinking water supplied through public distribution systems in an Indian city. Our findings identified bacteria from the phyla Pseudomonadota, Planctomycetota, Bacteroidota, and Actinomycetota, consistent with previous drinking water microbiome studies. We observed that the composition and diversity of the microbial community were influenced by the temperature of the water samples. No significant correlation between microbial abundance and metal concentration in the sample was detected. Additionally, we assessed the distribution of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), finding widespread resistance to aminoglycosides, tetracyclines, and macrolides across samples. However, the risk associated with these ARGs was out of the scope of this study. Overall, this research provides a preliminary analysis of the drinking water microbiome, offering a foundation for future management strategies.