Date of Submission

Fall 2021

Academic Program

Biology

Project Advisor 1

Gabriel G. Perron

Abstract/Artist's Statement

This study shows that temperature can have an effect on the antibiotic resistance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. P. aeruginosa is a bacteria that is often responsible for nosocomial burn, eye, and lung infections. Currently, standard clinical treatment protocols do not consider temperature as a factor that contributes to the resistance profile of P. aeruginosa. When hospitals test for the infection, they tend to swab the infected area, identify what is on the swab, then prescribe an antibiotic known to treat the particular bacteria found to be on the swab. After the antibiotic regimen, they may swab for the presence of the bacteria again—not necessarily swabbing all the parts of the infection. If some parts of the infection were warmer than others, then this test could result in a false-negative because P. aeruginosa may have responded differently to the antibiotics depending on the temperature of the area; some of the bacteria may have acquired resistance to the antibiotic conventionally used. This study thus warrants the need to reexamine the efficacy of current clinical treatment protocols. We tested 39 different strains of P. aeruginosa against three different antibiotics within three different temperatures (23°C, 35°C, and 42°C). The metric used for antibiotic susceptibility was the diameter of the zones of inhibition (ZOI) caused by the antibiotic disks placed within the lawns of P. aeruginosa, qualified using EUCAST standards. If temperature were to have a quantitative effect on the antibiotic resistance of P. aeruginosa, then the sizes of the ZOIs from the same antibiotic would differ significantly between temperatures.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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