Personal Blog Post #5

During the course of doing the group individual project, I have found great disappointment in the results of my and Dev's samples. I could be wrong in my thinking, but I figured an area like the mouth, which sees a large amount of foreign bacteria from food, drink, inhaled air, and whatever else, would have a large amount of competition that would lead to antibiotic production. However, this hypothesis has proven to be at the very least non-universal if not entirely untrue.

At first all seemed to go well following a slightly modified protocol, with the only major differences being the use of saliva instead of soil as a bacterial source and the lack of a 10^-5 dilution. Following the dilutions, a library plate was prepared and grew successfully and the bacteria seemed to be doing well. However, following the initial tests of making a library plate with an ESKAPE lawn, none of the samples produced any antibiotic activity. This step was redone with two different ESKAPE samples, and the results were even worse in the fact that all of the bacterial samples simply died and were consumed by the ESKAPEs. We tried again with two new ESKAPES, and we have yet to see these specific results, but I am not hopeful.

Results of the second attempt at initial ESKAPE testing.

Though I somewhat suspected failure at the beginning, I did not think the results of this would be as underwhelming as they are. I also have no real way to know from the results of these assays if its a problem with human bacteria, a problem with me and dev's specific microbiomes, the agar, or anything else. Likely if I was going to continue this and had more time, Id want to be able to explore more variables to see if there is a more ideal environment or human sampling source that would show antibiotic production. I also wonder if perhaps this lack of production has something to do with our body, like perhaps our immune system provides enough protection that these bacteria don't feel the need to produce these compounds or perhaps they are discouraged from producing antibiotic compounds as not to risk harming our cells. I don't know for sure but it is interesting and frustrating to think about.