Date of Submission
Spring 2022
Academic Program
Biology
Project Advisor 1
Brooke Jude
Abstract/Artist's Statement
The frequency of antibiotic resistance is rising exponentially across many bacterial pathogens and poses a major threat to current methods of infection treatment. The continuous use of diverse antimicrobial drugs has imposed selective pressure on many bacteria, causing their rate of mutation and resistance-acquisition to increase rapidly. Many bacterial pathogens are becoming multidrug-resistant and can be impossible to treat with traditional antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance is accelerated by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, so alternative treatments to decrease or eliminate their use will be needed in order to combat infectious, highly resistant bacterial strains. B. bacteriovorus is a small, Gram-negative bacterium and an obligate predator of other Gram-negative bacteria. Prey resistance to B. bacteriovorus is quite rare due to its seemingly non-specific parasitic mechanism of infecting bacteria cells, replicating inside the host, and lysing its prey. However, B. bacteriovorus is not able to clear entire pathogen populations alone. A recent study of the efficacy of violacein and B. bacteriovorus treatments of multidrug-resistant Gram-negative and Gram-positive pathogens found that alone, the effectiveness of each antimicrobial agent was low, but when combined, the clearance of the pathogen was significantly higher. This study could be replicated with many other antibiotics and their multidrug-resistant bacterial targets alongside B. bacteriovorus. The purpose of this study was to establish a working infection of Gram-negative prey bacteria with B. bacteriovorus that could then be implemented in similar examinations of potential antibiotic co-therapies.
Open Access Agreement
On-Campus only
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Morrison, Tate, "An Examination of the Potential Use of Predatory Bacteria as a Co-therapy with Traditional Antibiotics to Treat Multidrug-Resistant Bacterial Pathogens" (2022). Senior Projects Spring 2022. 83.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2022/83
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