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Isolation and Characterization of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria from the Lane College Soil
Author(s) -
McCullough Mariah,
Baker Aliayah,
Payne Quindarius,
Van Stry Melanie
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.2020.34.s1.06612
Subject(s) - bacteria , ampicillin , antibiotics , amoxicillin , microbiology and biotechnology , penicillin , antibiotic resistance , biology , clavulanic acid , gram negative bacteria , escherichia coli , biochemistry , genetics , gene
Since the late 1940’s antibiotics have been an asset to the treatment of bacterial diseases. Considering they are naturally occurring or synthetically made, they still slow down the growth of bacteria. β‐lactam antibiotics, like penicillin, kill sensitive bacteria by inhibiting the enzyme transpeptidase required for cell wall synthesis. The β‐lactamase producing bacteria are important contributors to resistant infections that have increasing concern in the battle against infectious diseases. Our goal for this project is to isolate and characterize antibiotic bacteria from the soil on the Lane College campus. In addition, we are characterizing beta‐lactamases present in these bacteria. We hypothesize that bacteria in the sample will be resistant to the beta‐lactam antibiotics. We collected a soil sample from Lane College campus and screened the presence of bacteria resistant to ampicillin. We selected three colonies for further analysis. We then used the β‐lactam antibiotics penicillin, amoxicillin, and ampicillin in the disk assay experiment to test for multidrug resistance. We also further characterized the bacteria with Gram staining. We concluded that our sample did contain multidrug antibiotic resistant bacteria. We will screen for the presence of the beta‐lactamases TEM‐1 and Bla‐1 with PCR followed by gel electrophoresis. Support or Funding Information This work is supported by NSF HRD 1623340.