Dyer student presents research at seventh annual Celebration of Scholars event

2017 May 2

Carthage College held the seventh annual Celebration of Scholars event on Friday, April 28, 2017. Celebration of Scholars is a poster exhibition that features original research, scholarship, and creative work completed by Carthage students.

Samuel DeCero of Dyer presented "The In Vitro Analysis of Antimicrobial Producing Pseudomonas sps. Isolated from Lake Michigan" at the event.

This is the project's abstract:

"Ever since the time of ancient Egypt, microbial infections have been attempted to be controlled. It was not until the mid twentieth century that humanity was able to have true success with controlling bacterial infections. The rise of antibiotics began with penicillin during World War II thanks to the scientific discovery of Alexander Fleming and the work of American scientists who developed techniques to mass produce antibiotics. Shortly after, resistance to antibiotics developed because of overuse and misuse in clinical, agricultural, and industrial settings. Today, antibiotic resistance has developed with nearly every antibiotic in use and development of new antibiotics has been slow. Within the past several years, bacteria isolated from Lake Michigan by students in the Microbiology course have been characterized for antimicrobial activity. In this study, eight bacteria from environmental samples of Lake Michigan have been used to determine the nature of their antimicrobial activity. Most of these eight bacteria were found to belong to the Pseudomonas genus based on 16S rRNA sequencing. Pseudomonads have been documented to be resistant to several different antibiotics and produce antimicrobial compounds. Antimicrobial production has been observed on four different hosts in our study: Escherichia coli, Mycobacterium smegmatis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Staphylococcus aureus. The ultimate goal of our study is to isolate and characterize the antimicrobial agents being produced in hopes to identify a potentially new antibiotic."