MicroMundo Upside Down: Targeted Searching for Antibiotics-Producing Bacteria From Soil With Reverse Antibiosis Approaches

MicroMundo Upside Down: Targeted Searching for Antibiotics-Producing Bacteria From Soil With Reverse Antibiosis Approaches

Blog Article

Tiny Earth (TE) is a popular international citizen science program aimed at improving public awareness on the growing antimicrobial resistance problem of which MicroMundo Albacete is read more a Spanish node.With a protocol that is focused on the isolation of antibiotics-producing actinomycetes from soil, 70% of the high school students in MicroMundo Albacete 2020 isolated colonies with antagonistic activity against Gram-positive tester bacteria.However, no activity was found against Gram-negative bacteria.Here, we further adapted the protocol toward a more targeted screening that also enables isolation of antagonistic bacteria against Gram negatives using two different reverse-antibiosis approaches involving a spraying technique or flipping soil sample disks upside down.

Exploiting the soil samples from MicroMundo Albacete 2020, the new approaches yielded isolation of actinomycete bempresas.com bacteria with antagonistic activity against Gram-negative as well as Gram-positive tester bacteria.We propose that (educational) science programs which aim to search for antibiotic-producing bacteria may implement these approaches in their protocol to promote a successful and stimulating outcome of the experiment for the participating students.