Under-appreciated phylogroup diversity of Escherichia coli within and between animals at the urban-wildland interface

E. coli is usually good for you! Is it good for animals, too? We don’t really know, but they certainly carry it! And as we show here, a much greater diversity of it than we so far appreciate. But why? It has likely existed in wild animals for a long time, but I suspect that an ever-increasing human population, and resulting extensive environmental pollution by our waste combined with various antimicrobial agents, has already impacted environmental and wild animal gut bacteria at large. We reason that due to extensive anthropogenic environmental contamination, wildlife is increasingly exposed to our waste, including E. coli and antibiotics. The gaps in the ecological and evolutionary understanding of E. coli thus necessitate a significant uptick in research to better understand human impacts on wildlife and the risk for zoonotic pathogen emergence. Thus, the already famous model organism, E. coli, might just be ideally suited to serve as a model for understanding the ecology and evolution of microbes at the human-wildlife interface in the Anthropocene.

Recommended citation: Lagerstrom, K. M. and Hadly, E. A. 2023. Under-appreciated phylogroup diversity of Escherichia coli within and between animals at the urban-wildland interface. Applied and Environmental Microbiology 89(6); e00142-23. https://doi.org/10.1128/aem.00142-23
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