Independent Project - Personal Blog Post 6

After doing my first educational blog post on the different types of oxygen metabolism in bacteria, the idea of how oxygen will effect antibiotic production has been very interesting to me, which is why I proposed a project involving it for the independent section if this class.

Initially, what I really wanted to see was if anaerobic bacteria would be more efficient at producing antibiotics against an aerobic bacteria. My thought process was that by isolating bacteria from an aerobic region and growing it in anaerobic conditions, I would be selecting for the facultative anaerobes, as those are the ones that don't utilize oxygen but can live without it. Since they have an entirely different mechanism of respiration from an obligate aerobe like A. baylyii, I theorized that anaerobic bacteria may be able to produce an antibiotic that inhibits the cellular respiration pathway in A. baylyii.

Our actual experimental design ended up resulting in more of a concentration test where we were testing how oxygen stressed different bacteria into producing more antibiotics. To actually test my theory of facultative anaerobes, I think more involved testing would be required concerning identifying the types of bacteria being used to ensure I was actually looking at facultative anaerobes. This is a project I would maybe consider looking into in the future.