When resistant microbes are exposed to antimicrobials, they increase their expression of genes that confer this resistance. The risk of bacterial antibiotic resistance has been studied by quantitatively monitoring the abundance of the tetQ gene in wastewater microcosms. As tetQ is the most common resistance gene in the environment and encodes for ribosomal protection proteins, the amount that it expresses correlates with the amount of resistance in a microbial population. The addition of triclocarban was shown to increase the expression of this tetQ gene.