Project:

Identification of bacteriophage DNA, known to infect pathogenic bacteria, from environmental samples

Students:

Alexandra Nath, Shreoshe Sushil

Institution:

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount SInai, Manhattan

Mentors:

Laurence Webb

Abstract:

The rise of antibiotic resistant bacterial species is of growing concern to global public health. New resistant species and mechanisms are arising and spreading, threatening our ability to treat even common bacterial infections. Use of bacteriophages, viruses which are specific to bacteria, to treat bacterial infections, can help solve the problem of antibiotic resistance. Bacteriophages are estimated to be some of the most abundant organisms, with as many as one trillion viral particles present for every grain of sand on earth. Due to the amount of bacteriophages found in nature, we hypothesized that isolation of specific bacteriophages, which target pathogenic human bacteria, would be feasible from a small number of random soil samples. Here, as a proof of principle, we attempted to isolate nucleic acid of two different bacteriophages, which infect bacteria that cause disease in humans: Clostridium phage phiCT9441A and Klebsiella phage vB_KpnS_Domnhall.

Poster:

Team samples: