Antibiotic Candidate Discoveries
Location
CoLab
Start Date
3-5-2019 9:00 AM
End Date
3-5-2019 10:15 AM
Document Type
Poster
Description
In today’s society we are facing more and more challenges with antibiotic resistance in the medical field. There are many factors that come into play that influence this obstacle. In this class we have learned about six different pathogens that fall into an antibiotic resistant category and they are known as ESKAPE pathogens. The pathogens that put this name together are; Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumonia, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter species. We have available to us microbes, that are considered “safe cousins” to these dangerous antibiotic resistant pathogens, of which we can use to test potential antibiotic microbes against to see if there is any chance of prohibiting the growth of these pathogens. The way we are to collect such potential candidates are through soil samples that we collect from diverse areas. Once we document where our sample of dirt came from, we are to perform a serial dilution so that we can obtain pure cultures of the different microbes that are within our sample. Once we are able to differentiate between different microbial colonies on our diluted agar plates, we are to pick out 4-6 potential candidates that we will perform a series of tests to determine if they have any antibiotic characteristics. Once we get a good set of candidates we test them against the “safe cousins” of the ESKAPE pathogens. We call them tester strains. The way we do this is to plate our candidates with a lawn of growth of each individual tester strains to see if there is any inhibition of growth around your candidates, which will determine if they contain any antibiotics against the tester strains. If we are able to see any zones of inhibition around any of our chosen microbes from the dirt sample against any one of the tester strains, then we will know if we have any solid candidates for antibiotics. We will then choose the best candidate based on this test to do further testing including; differential staining techniques, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) sequencing, catalase reactions, oxidase reactions, and anaerobic/aerobic reactions. These further tests will give us more information about the microbe we are dealing with so that we can put together a solid conclusion about what we have found so that we may be able to contribute to new discoveries of antibiotics to fight the pathogens we may face in the future.
Antibiotic Candidate Discoveries
CoLab
In today’s society we are facing more and more challenges with antibiotic resistance in the medical field. There are many factors that come into play that influence this obstacle. In this class we have learned about six different pathogens that fall into an antibiotic resistant category and they are known as ESKAPE pathogens. The pathogens that put this name together are; Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumonia, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter species. We have available to us microbes, that are considered “safe cousins” to these dangerous antibiotic resistant pathogens, of which we can use to test potential antibiotic microbes against to see if there is any chance of prohibiting the growth of these pathogens. The way we are to collect such potential candidates are through soil samples that we collect from diverse areas. Once we document where our sample of dirt came from, we are to perform a serial dilution so that we can obtain pure cultures of the different microbes that are within our sample. Once we are able to differentiate between different microbial colonies on our diluted agar plates, we are to pick out 4-6 potential candidates that we will perform a series of tests to determine if they have any antibiotic characteristics. Once we get a good set of candidates we test them against the “safe cousins” of the ESKAPE pathogens. We call them tester strains. The way we do this is to plate our candidates with a lawn of growth of each individual tester strains to see if there is any inhibition of growth around your candidates, which will determine if they contain any antibiotics against the tester strains. If we are able to see any zones of inhibition around any of our chosen microbes from the dirt sample against any one of the tester strains, then we will know if we have any solid candidates for antibiotics. We will then choose the best candidate based on this test to do further testing including; differential staining techniques, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) sequencing, catalase reactions, oxidase reactions, and anaerobic/aerobic reactions. These further tests will give us more information about the microbe we are dealing with so that we can put together a solid conclusion about what we have found so that we may be able to contribute to new discoveries of antibiotics to fight the pathogens we may face in the future.
Comments
The faculty supervisor for this project was Matthew Faulkner, Biology.