Sampling Soil for Novel Antibiotic Producing Bacteria

Bacteria produce antibiotics to enhance their survival by killing other competing bacterial colonies. However, like all life forms, bacteria evolve rapidly to adapt and become resistant to antibiotics. This has led to what is becoming the number one issue in the health care industry as many different bacteria are becoming resistant to all known antibiotics and becoming virtually untreatable. The purpose of our research is to collect and test soil from dozens of different locations to see whether any bacteria in those samples appear to produce antibiotics. We then match potential candidates up with bacteria that are known to be highly resistant to current antibiotics and observe whether the candidate creates a barrier between its colonies and those of the antibiotic resistant bacteria. We, as a class, have found dozens of candidates that produce effective antibiotics to at least one of the highly resistant bacteria. Individually, I have analyzed a strain of bacteria that produce antibiotics effective against Staphylococcus aureus, one of the leading causes of skin infections and a difficult type of bacteria to treat