Project:

Hitchhikers in Honey

Students:

Vicky Yan, Student Student

Institution:

The New School, Manhattan

Mentors:

Davida Smyth

Abstract:

Antibiotic resistance among pathogenic bacteria threatens global health today, raising the specter of diseases innocuous today becoming the deadly epidemic of tomorrow. It is imperative to investigate new antibiotics to counter adapting resistance to already widespread medicines, requiring researchers to look in increasingly novel places. We have recently discovered bacteria living in raw honey samples, a product well known for never spoiling because of its high osmotic pressure and acidity that supposedly render it sterile. In this experiment, we propose to characterize these bacteria and to test whether they contribute to the antimicrobial properties of honey by looking for zones of inhibition after swabbing honey bacterial isolates on plates covered with tester pathogenic strains.

Poster:

Team samples: