Eric Bastien
BS ’18
Everyday antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria are dumped into Lake Michigan via wastewater effluents and agricultural runoff. Their ecological impact, however, is not well understood. Antibiotics target bacterial cells, thus to understand the impact of environmental antibiotics we must first explore their impact on microbial ecology (the interactions of all single-celled organisms and their viruses with one another and their environments), specifically.
We aim to isolate a novel virus and its bacterial host from Lake Michigan to study phage-antibiotic synergy under model Great Lakes conditions. To understand the dynamics of Lake Michigan and the entire Great Lakes ecosystems, it is essential to better understand the dynamics of microbes and their viruses in light of anthropogenic disturbances, such as unnatural levels of antibiotics. Knowledge of these interactions is of great interest to communities along shorelines and those that depend on the Great Lakes for drinking water, as well as the global community that grapples daily with the crisis of multidrug antibiotic resistance.
Library Mentor: Scott Martin