| Hi, my name is Carolin and I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Florey Institute at the University of Sheffield. I am a member of Dr Andrew Fenton’s research group, and in our laboratory we focus on the human pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae. |  Caro the postdoc in her natural environment |
S. pneumoniae causes many life-threatening diseases, including sepsis, meningitis and pneumonia. Therefore this bacterium a major cause of death worldwide, with highest infection rates among infants, elderly people and immunocompromised individuals. S. pneumoniae infections are commonly treated with beta-lactam antibiotics like penicillin, yet an alarmingly high number of isolates from patients has developed resistance against this type of antibiotic, leaving patients at risk. While the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines led to a reduction of infections there continuously new antibiotic resistant strains emerging that are not covered by the vaccination program.
Here are some impressions of my lab work, showing some of the agar plates I needed for my genetic screen. They serve as nutrient source for the bacteria and can be enriched with antibiotics as required for my experiment.
To counteract the global threat of antibiotic resistance, it is important to understand the biological mechanisms underpinning resistance in S. pneumoniae. This is why my project aims to identify and characterise novel genes linked to antibiotic resistance. To this end, we performed a large-scale genetic screen in the presence and absence of penicillin. This approach will point out which genes are essential under antibiotic selection, and likely involved in penicillin resistance mechanisms.
So far, I have focused on building the large-scale ‘libraries’ of bacterial cells we need for the genetic screen. As you can tell from the pictures, I needed loads of agar plates to accommodate all the bacterial cells and had to rely on everyone in the lab to help me harvest the cells and prepare them for sequencing.
I am currently waiting for the results of the screen and I am very excited to find out about which genes could play a role in penicillin resistance, so we can further investigate them.
