SOIL: The Antibiotic Frontier

Bacteria are, quite literally, ubiquitous. While some are innocuous and even beneficial, other pathogenic varieties have shown alarming antibiotic resistance and are developing faster than current medical therapies can. Crowdsourcing potential novel antibiotics, such as in this Small World Initiative (SWI) student research, is a promising approach to this dilemma. The SWI allows students from over 170 schools throughout the globe to submit original research on potential antibiotic candidates. Owing to the known bacterial-rich supply in soil, students obtain and refine soil samples from their own communities. In this project, soil was obtained from Shawnee, KS. It was diluted and cultured, revealing round smooth flat- slightly convex colonies with egg-yolk centers and translucent margins. These colonies, when screened against safe relatives of the so-called ESKAPE pathogens (those bacterial species that are most resistant to current antibiotics), showed inhibition against the bacillus gram-positives: Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus megaterium. The candidate organism was submitted for sequencing to compare it to species with established identification and subjected to microscopic analysis and metabolic testing