Searching for Antibiotics in the Soil
Location
CoLab
Start Date
3-5-2019 1:30 PM
End Date
3-5-2019 2:45 PM
Document Type
Poster
Description
Antibiotic resistance is an increasingly large problem because of the overuse and improper use of antibiotics in the hospital and on farms. There is a growing fear that someday we will have an outbreak of diseases we can no longer control because of the lack of antibiotics. My research focuses on a project with the Tiny Earth Network, that offers students the opportunity to participate in this search for new antibiotics. Because of the wide diversity of bacteria found in dirt as well as its need to inhibit growth of other bacteria, the soil is a great place to look for potential antibiotics. This poster explores how potential antibiotics can be found in the dirt, and how I obtained a dirt sample and cultured the growth in search of potential antibiotics. My dirt sample was taken from my backyard garden bed and I did not end up finding any antibiotic producing bacteria from this sample. So, I used someone else’s candidate that had antibiotic potential, and further genetic identification and metabolic characterization will be done on this new candidate.
Image
Searching for Antibiotics in the Soil
CoLab
Antibiotic resistance is an increasingly large problem because of the overuse and improper use of antibiotics in the hospital and on farms. There is a growing fear that someday we will have an outbreak of diseases we can no longer control because of the lack of antibiotics. My research focuses on a project with the Tiny Earth Network, that offers students the opportunity to participate in this search for new antibiotics. Because of the wide diversity of bacteria found in dirt as well as its need to inhibit growth of other bacteria, the soil is a great place to look for potential antibiotics. This poster explores how potential antibiotics can be found in the dirt, and how I obtained a dirt sample and cultured the growth in search of potential antibiotics. My dirt sample was taken from my backyard garden bed and I did not end up finding any antibiotic producing bacteria from this sample. So, I used someone else’s candidate that had antibiotic potential, and further genetic identification and metabolic characterization will be done on this new candidate.
Comments
The faculty supervisor for this project was Heather Seitz, Biology.