Abstract:
Antibiotic resistance among bacterial pathogens is one of the greatest challenges to
modern medicine and human society, but it is a problem so often ignored by many people. Many
different multi-drug resistant species of bacteria including the ESKAPE group (Enterococcus
faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii,
Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter spp.), Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and Escherichia
coli among others have been the cause of many hospital-acquired and antibiotic-resistant
infections. Projections show that antibiotic resistance is predicted to lead to the premature loss of
over 300 million human lives and damages equal to 100 trillion U.S. dollars to the global
economy by the year 2050 if new antibiotics or another effective solution to this problem are not
found. As part of the effort to combat this problem, this thesis details and documents the research
project undertaken to isolate and discover antibiotic-producing fungi from dairy farm
environments capable of combating the ESKAPE pathogens. Dairy farms and other similar
environments are severely underexplored on a microbiological level and therefore hold
enormous untapped potential. Our goal was to discover antibiotic-producing fungi capable of
inhibiting the growth of at least one species of the ESKAPE bacteria.
