Backyard sample of antibiotic
Location
CoLab, OCB 100
Start Date
27-4-2018 12:00 PM
Document Type
Poster
Description
Antibiotics are a major issue in today's society. We are lacking the antibiotics we need because a lot of companies have stopped making antibiotics due to antibiotic resistance increase. So the purpose of this project that I did, was to find out if I could discover an antibiotic of some kind in my backyard soil sample. I did many experiments to find a candidate and isolate it. The experiments involved doing a serial dilution with my soil sample from my backyard, then choosing potential candidates that had a clearing zone from the other colonies in my plates from the serial dilution, then I had to isolate each one on its own plate after weeks of them running into each other on my master plate. Finally after all my candidates were on their own plate, I did an antibiotic screening swabbing a plate with a gram negative and a plate with a gram positive. I used E.coli and E.faecalis. Then each one of the plates gets a swab from one of my candidates, after this I was able to tell that my #8 (han-solo is it's name) was the only one that had a perfect clearing zone, which indicated an antibiotic. These experiments confirmed my hypothesis that from my backyard soil sample in Overland Park Ks, I was able to find some type of antibiotic. Which showed me from this project I have concluded antibiotics can be all around us, and it's up to us to keep searching for new ones or we run into the problem of eventually running or of antibiotics that actually work against our pathogens.
Image
Backyard sample of antibiotic
CoLab, OCB 100
Antibiotics are a major issue in today's society. We are lacking the antibiotics we need because a lot of companies have stopped making antibiotics due to antibiotic resistance increase. So the purpose of this project that I did, was to find out if I could discover an antibiotic of some kind in my backyard soil sample. I did many experiments to find a candidate and isolate it. The experiments involved doing a serial dilution with my soil sample from my backyard, then choosing potential candidates that had a clearing zone from the other colonies in my plates from the serial dilution, then I had to isolate each one on its own plate after weeks of them running into each other on my master plate. Finally after all my candidates were on their own plate, I did an antibiotic screening swabbing a plate with a gram negative and a plate with a gram positive. I used E.coli and E.faecalis. Then each one of the plates gets a swab from one of my candidates, after this I was able to tell that my #8 (han-solo is it's name) was the only one that had a perfect clearing zone, which indicated an antibiotic. These experiments confirmed my hypothesis that from my backyard soil sample in Overland Park Ks, I was able to find some type of antibiotic. Which showed me from this project I have concluded antibiotics can be all around us, and it's up to us to keep searching for new ones or we run into the problem of eventually running or of antibiotics that actually work against our pathogens.
Comments
The faculty supervisor for this project was Melissa Beaty, Biology.