Isolation of dairy farm antibiotic-producing fungi effective against bacterial pathogens

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.