MicroMundo@Oeiras: citizen science promoting antibiotic stewardship, discovery of new antimicrobials, and monitoring of soil resistance

The alarming rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an emerging public health challenge to our society. Although resistance is an inevitable evolutionary process, finding new antimicrobials, mapping AMR, and raising community awareness leading to better hygiene attitudes and more responsible antibiotic consumption, when treatment is really required, is a cost-effective route to slow down the pace of resistance propagation. In MicroMundo@Oeiras, a citizen science project implemented at the ITQB NOVA research institute, we have successfully expanded to the Oeiras Municipality in the Lisbon metropolitan area (Portugal) the service-learning MicroMundo project based on the Tiny Earth/Small World Initiative, aimed to explore soil microbial biodiversity in search for novel antibiotics and simultaneously educating a fraction of the community at the university, and junior and high school level about AMR. Moreover, we have successfully extended the MicroMundo protocols to characterize the frequency of resistant soil bacteria to the antibiotics' amoxicillin, tetracycline, and ciprofloxacin. Our preliminary results using this coupled analysis suggest that AMR soil bacteria are likely to be more prevalent than antibiotic-producing bacteria, creating a stimulating experimental outcome for the enrolled citizen scientists, and broadening the scope of possible scientific questions. We have also created a public database, where all AMR frequency found in the isolated soil bacteria will be regularly updated, creating a novel AMR data source with information from unconventional monitoring sites.