What it is
Canonical name: arsenic.
Known alias: As. 1
This document does not report a stable external identifier for arsenic. 1
Evidence from the MicrobeAtlas metal-ecology study
Arsenic was one of 7 metal types represented in genus-level AMRFinderPlus resistance annotations linked to GTDB data and MicrobeAtlas ecological niche breadth. 1
In the leave-one-metal-out sensitivity analysis, removing arsenic produced a positive but non-significant association between metal-type diversity and Levins’ B_std niche breadth: β = +0.0039 and p = 0.518. 1
The study interpreted the persistence of a positive coefficient after excluding each of the 7 metals, including arsenic, as consistent with a distributed signal, while noting that reducing the maximum diversity score from 7 to 6 compresses predictor variance and reduces statistical power. 1
Arsenic was among the recommended stresses for proposed microcosm experiments targeting organisms with both broad inferred niche breadth and diverse metal-resistance repertoires. 1
Evidence from soil functional genomics
A separate soil study included arsenic among 9 metals analyzed across 51,748 soil samples and identified 2,355 significant COG–metal associations at FDR < 0.05; because the results are aggregate and observational, they do not establish an arsenic-specific association. 2 This refines the MicrobeAtlas result by extending arsenic-related evidence from resistance annotations and niche breadth to soil functional-gene associations, while retaining the need to separate arsenic effects from co-contaminating metals. 2
Related pages
The study’s broader result—that diversity across metal types, rather than total AMR cluster count, was associated with broader inferred ecological ranges—feeds into metal-cross-resistance. 1
The soil study’s multi-metal associations support the relevance of environmental metal–gene relationships to environmental-resistome, but its co-contamination caveat prevents treating the observed signals as arsenic-specific resistance evidence. 2
The arsenic analysis is part of the AMRFinderPlus-based environmental resistance study summarized in Metal Resistance Ecology — Phylogenetic Conservation vs. Environmental Selection. 1
The soil functional-gene analysis is summarized in Soil Metal Concentrations Drive Functional Gene Shifts. 2
Related methods and data resources include amrfinderplus, gtdb, and microbial-atlas. 1