Environmental hotspots for antibiotic resistant bacteria arb

The overuse and misuse of antibiotics in environmental and clinical settings have been a
driving force for the prevalence of bacterial resistance. In constant interaction with these
chemicals which can harm them, adaptively and inherently, bacteria have devised resistance
mechanisms to combat the deleterious effects posed. In the presence of a particular antibiotic, it
is expected there will be selection of resistant micro-organisms and their associated resistance
genes if present. In this study, a set of 10 samples were taken from recreational beaches in Ft.
Lauderdale, Miami and Hollywood and four different agricultural soils. These soils were
enriched after being collected aseptically with three commonly used antibiotics; Ciprofloxacin,
Tetracycline and Vancomycin to select for resistant organisms, which produced 29 total samples.
A metagenomic analysis was done with 16S rDNA amplification with primers 27F and 1492R
which produced 14 out of 29 amplicons producing the expected ~1400 bp fragment from the
conserved SSU 16S rDNA region using Agarose gel electrophoresis. From these 14 samples
amplified, a second PCR would be run from each enriched antibiotic sample with their respective
antibiotic resistance primers eg. vanA-D, tetO and qnrA to identify the resistance genes present
expecting that the antibiotic used for enrichment would select for the resistant organisms. Future
work includes the sequencing of the amplified resistance genes to help identify novel genetic
alterations indicative of new adaptive mechanisms.