Genetic diversity is an important component of biodiversity, and it is crucial for current efforts to protect and sustainably manage several organisms and habitats. As far as we know, there is only one work describing Peruvian genetic information stored in public databases. We aimed to update this previous work searching in four public databases that stored digital sequence information: Nucleotide, BioProject, PATRIC, BOLD. With this information, we comment on the contribution of Peruvian institutions during recent years. In Nucleotide, the largest database, Bacteria are the most sequenced organisms by Peruvian institutions (70.60%), pathogenic bacteria such as Pasteurella multocida, Neisseria meningitidis, and Vibrio parahaemolyticus were the most abundant. We found no sequence records from the Archaea domain. In BioProject, the most common sequence belongs to Salmonella enterica subsp....

The Rimac river is the main source of water for Lima, Peru's capital megacity. The river is constantly affected by different types of contamination including mine tailings in the Andes and urban sewage in the metropolitan area. In this work, we aim to produce the first characterization of aquatic bacterial communities in the Rimac river using a 16S rRNA metabarcoding approach which would be useful to identify bacterial diversity and potential understudied pathogens. We report a lower diversity in bacterial communities from the Lower Rimac (Metropolitan zone) in comparison to other sub-basins. Samples were generally grouped according to their geographical location. Bacterial classes Alphaproteobacteria, Bacteroidia, Campylobacteria, Fusobacteriia, and Gammaproteobacteria were the most frequent along the river. Arcobacter cryaerophilus (Campylobacteria) was the most frequent species in the...

The widespread and poorly regulated use of antibiotics in animal production in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is increasingly associated with the emergence and dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in retail animal products. Here, we compared Escherichia coli from chickens and humans with varying levels of exposure to chicken meat in a low-income community in the southern outskirts of Lima, Peru. We hypothesize that current practices in local poultry production result in highly resistant commensal bacteria in chickens that can potentially colonize the human gut. E. coli was isolated from cloacal swabs of non-organic (n = 41) and organic chickens (n = 20), as well as from stools of market chicken vendors (n = 23), non-vendors (n = 48), and babies (n = 60). 315 E. coli isolates from humans (n = 150) and chickens (n = 165) were identified, with chickens showing highe...