The Next Antibiotic Is in Your Basement

Few things can be said to have revolutionized medicine like antibiotics. They also sparked an arms race that bacteria had billions of years of preparation for. Only constant innovation has kept humanity’s narrowing edge. Since the discovery of antibiotics, soil has held immense potential for further discoveries of antibiotic mechanisms. Antibiotic resistance is rising globally at alarming rates. The speed of pathogen generational turnover, their ability to pass resistant genes across species, and the general overuse of antibiotics has medicine falling behind. Prospects for new developments in the current classes are bleak. In response, the search has been crowdsourced to microbiology students around the globe. The Tiny Earth project from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has student scientists returning to the soil. In this paper, a sample was gathered from between gaps in the concrete basement slab of a one hundred year old house that sat abandoned and partially flooded for almost 20 years. A number of candidate species from that sample showed signs of having antibiotic properties. This was seen by zones of inhibition after serial dilutions and then again when tested against known safe relatives of ESKAPE pathogens. One of these candidate species was selected for further study. Attempts to identify that selected candidate species included staining, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and gel electrophoresis. Results were passed on to the Tiny Earth databases.