Antibiotic Discovery

This is a picture of the Antibiotic Discovery Group taken in the Fall of 2015.

This picture shows an example of an interesting mushroom collected from the Kramer woods in Oxford.

This shows a typical disc assay experiment. A bacterium is spread over the agar plate, a circular paper disc is placed on the agar plate, and then a small aliquot of mushroom extract is pipetted onto the paper disc. The agar plate is then incubated overnight. The clear zones surrounding the paper discs indicate "inhibition zones" where the bacteria fail to grow due to the presence of an antibiotic compound in the extract.

In this project, we attempt to discover new antibiotics from local mushrooms. Students collect their own mushroom samples from the forests surrounding Oxford. DNA is collected from the mushroom samples to enable identification of the mushroom species. Extracts of each mushroom species are prepared and used to test for antibiotic activity using several Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. For those mushrooms that exhibit antibiotic activity, we attempt to purify the active compound using a combination of Liquid Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry and Nuclear Magnetic resonance Spectroscopy.