Antibiotic Resistance of Elizabethkinga miricola

Abstract

  "Elizabethkingia, a bacterial species causing human disease, was found to be resistant to many different antibiotics through beta-lactamase. Antibiotics are a type of medicine used to treat bacterial infections while beta-lactamase is an enzyme that provides antibiotic resistance by breaking downs the antibiotics' structure. There are many different types of Elizabethkingia species such as Elizabethkingiameningoseptica, miricola, and anopheles. Elizabethkingiameningosepticais found in nature all around us while Elizabethkingiamiricola was found on the Mir space station. Elizabethkingiaanophelis is found in the gut of mosquitoes and has already been tested to be resistant to more than twenty different antibiotics. In this article, we determined whether or not our given genomic sequence of Elizabethkingiamiricolawould be positive for encoding a beta lactamase gene. After PCR Amplification, DNA ligation, and heat shock transformation of E. Coli, we were able to determine whether or not our genetic sequence was a beta-lactamase gene. All beta-lactamase enzymes break the bond of the beta-lactam ring in penicillin, a strong antibiotic effective against many different bacterial infections, inactivating it making that specific bacteria resistant to that antibiotic. Nitrocefin is a chemical compound sensitive to hydrolysis of all known beta-lactamases produced by bacteria. We placed our plate transformation mixtures onto saturated nitrocefin disks to finally determine whether our mixture was positive for beta-lactamase genes. Our mixtures were positive for beta-lactamase if the disks turned red, and negative if they stayed pale yellow."