Research Symposium

BIO

Maryanne is an undergraduate researcher in the Crofts lab majoring in Biomathematics. After getting her undergraduate degree, she hopes to attend medical school to later become a doctor.

Identifying Erythromycin Resistance

Abstract

Antibiotics are essential to modern medicine and the prevention of the spread of disease; however, antibiotic resistance has been growing for decades. As researchers have studied this growing resistance, they have had much success with finding resistance genes in various microbiomes, though this research is often limited to gram-negative antibiotics that can be studied with E. coli. Gram-positive antibiotics, such as Erythromycin, have been met with less success in studies involving E. coli. Through my research of Erythromycin, an antibiotic used to treat pneumonia and other pathogens, we have found that the use of an efflux inhibitor, PAβN, has yielded greater advancement in resistance study. A functional metagenomic selection was originally performed in order to find potentially interesting DNA targets that could confer resistance. I was able to isolate these targets, transform them into E. coli , and study its growth against antibiotics with and without the efflux inhibitor. We were able to identify one Erythromycin resistance gene so far, and through some troubleshooting and continued work with microbiological assays and DNA sequencing, we hope to be able to identify more in the future.

Keywords: antibiotic, resistance, bacteria