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High-Throughput Two-Stage Dereplication Of Cave Bacteria To Discover Novel Antibiotic Compounds, Alexander Archey

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Since their discovery over a century ago, antibiotics have been a staple of combating infectious diseases. However, bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics through a variety of mechanisms. Efforts to identify new antibiotics often fail by discovering already-known antibiotics, or failing to synthesize new antibiotics that are safe for clinical use. The aim of this research was to dereplicate bacteria- to screen for antibiotic production in- normally isolated in cave ecosystems. Using two new technologies, the Antibiotic Resistance Platform (ARP) and a data acquisition and bioinformatics technique (IDBac), my dereplicating method allowed high throughput of bacterial screening for antibiotics. In this …