Project:

Antibiotic Prospecting from Plant Microbial Endophytes

Students:

Olivia Patterson, Lily Johnson, Celeste Giannoulias

Institution:

Pace University, Manhattan

Mentors:

JEANMAIRE MOLINA

Abstract:

Antibiotics are substances that kill bacteria and reduce the spread of bacterial infections, with many derived from natural metabolites produced by bacteria and fungi. However, pathogenic bacteria keep evolving resistance against many of our antibiotics, resulting in a shortage of effective antibiotics. The Small World Initiative (SWI) hopes to address this problem by crowd-sourcing antibiotic discovery with the help of students by sampling local soils for novel antibiotic-producing bacteria and testing their products against safe relatives of pathogens. However, another untapped but potential source of new antibiotics are plant endophytes, which are mutualistic microbes, bacteria or fungi, living within plant tissues. Some endophytes produce metabolites that promote plant growth, maximize nutrient acquisition, even enhance immune responses of their plant hosts by producing antibiotics. Following published SWI protocols, though in lieu of soil sampling, we will isolate endophytes from

Poster:

Team samples: