What Lies Beneath: The Search for Novel Antibiotics
Location
CoLab, OCB 100
Start Date
27-4-2018 12:00 PM
Document Type
Poster
Description
Multi-drug resistant bacteria have become difficult to treat in the health care setting. Antibiotic discovery has not kept pace enough to slow this problematic microbial evolution. Currently, the majority of antibiotics used in the clinical setting were identified from soil microbes. In order to identify bacteria capable of producing innovative and useful types of antibiotics, I isolated and characterized bacteria from a soil sample obtained from my backyard. A zone of inhibition was identified for one unknown colony type on my backyard soil serial dilution plates. This colony was selected for antibiotic screening against “tester” bacteria strains. The tester strains include safe relatives of ESKAPE pathogens, the group of multi-drug resistant strains causing most hospital-acquired infections. Microscopic morphology, metabolic analysis, and DNA sequencing data will also be completed to determine the species of this unknown colony. If further experimentation does not demonstrate effective antibiotic production from this unknown colony, this data will still provide knowledge regarding soil microbes in the Kansas City area. A lack of new antibiotics characterized from this study would indicate to researchers that they should select soil samples from other geographical locations for follow-up investigation.
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What Lies Beneath: The Search for Novel Antibiotics
CoLab, OCB 100
Multi-drug resistant bacteria have become difficult to treat in the health care setting. Antibiotic discovery has not kept pace enough to slow this problematic microbial evolution. Currently, the majority of antibiotics used in the clinical setting were identified from soil microbes. In order to identify bacteria capable of producing innovative and useful types of antibiotics, I isolated and characterized bacteria from a soil sample obtained from my backyard. A zone of inhibition was identified for one unknown colony type on my backyard soil serial dilution plates. This colony was selected for antibiotic screening against “tester” bacteria strains. The tester strains include safe relatives of ESKAPE pathogens, the group of multi-drug resistant strains causing most hospital-acquired infections. Microscopic morphology, metabolic analysis, and DNA sequencing data will also be completed to determine the species of this unknown colony. If further experimentation does not demonstrate effective antibiotic production from this unknown colony, this data will still provide knowledge regarding soil microbes in the Kansas City area. A lack of new antibiotics characterized from this study would indicate to researchers that they should select soil samples from other geographical locations for follow-up investigation.
Comments
The faculty supervisor for this project was Jon Kniss, Biology.