Using Soil Isolates to Test for Antibiotic Production

Using Soil Isolates to Test for Antibiotic Production

Presenter(s)

Sean Andrew Kelly

Comments

This poster reflects research conducted as part of a course project designed to give students experience in the research process.

Description

Antibiotic Resistance is a global phenomenon that has developed rapidly over the past few decades due to healthcare providers and regular people misusing these medications. Bacterial communities have the ability to become resistant to antibiotics through a number of mechanisms, such as horizontal gene transfer, which can provide members of the community genes that generate proteins to employ a defense mechanism against antibiotics. When antibiotics are introduced into a bacterial community they kill the members of the population that do not have antibiotic resistant genes and select for the ones which do. This creates a population of antibiotic resistant bacteria which are capable of becoming resistant to multiple antibiotics. Many of the known antibiotics were isolated from soil samples, where diverse bacterial communities compete with each other for nutrients and survival. The purpose of this research project is to isolate individual bacterial communities to search for antibiotic producing properties that could be beneficial to the medical and healthcare fields. Soil isolates underwent several biochemical analysis tests, which tested for identification, production of antibiotic properties, and extraction of the compound responsible for production of that compound. The isolates were tested against safe relatives of known pathogens to determine their ability to survive using antibiotics. With the rising wave of antibiotic resistance, there are many reasons why testing for antibiotic producing species is beneficial to the communities of people that are affected by this global crisis.

Publication Date

4-24-2019

Project Designation

Course Project

Primary Advisor

Erica Marie Rinehart, Yvonne Y. Sun

Primary Advisor's Department

Biology

Keywords

Stander Symposium project

Using Soil Isolates to Test for Antibiotic Production

Share

COinS