Westerville North High School students collect soil samples from the Larimore Land Lab.
Students in Advanced Placement Biology classes at Westerville North and Central high schools are participating in a unique citizen science collaborative with The Ohio State University. Pupils in the classrooms of Brooke Cochran (North) and Autumn McCormick (Central) are collecting and analyzing soil samples to be entered into a database as part of a national study being overseen by Yale University called the PARE project – Prevalence of Antibiotic Resistance in the Environment. Westerville’s involvement is being coordinated by Science Curriculum Specialist Lyndsey Manzo.
How can something like soil be interesting and relevant to antibiotic-resistant infections in humans? According to PARE, individuals generally do not become infected through handling of environmental soil, but soils exposed to high levels of antibiotics tend to harbor high levels of antibiotic-resistant microbes. When antibiotics are used in the home, hospital or farm, the surrounding environment is likely to become exposed due to antibiotics excreted in the feces, discarding of unused prescriptions, and agricultural run-off spread through waterways. These antibiotic pollutants, in turn, can select for growth of resistant microbes in the affected area. Studies have indicated that people who work or live close to those soils are likely to harbor relatively high levels of resistant microbes on their skin or in their intestinal tracts as part of the population of normal microbes associated with our bodies. Whether these microbes are a source of antibiotic-resistant infections is unclear, but researchers would like to understand more about the connection between environmental resistance and clinical infections.
In order to determine if the presence of antibiotic-resistant microbes in the environment is linked to clinical infections, detailed surveillance across a broad geographic range is necessary. This requires reporting at many different sites where all values are determined using the same methodology. Westerville students were invited to participate with other pupils around the country to coordinate efforts using a “crowd-sourcing approach” to track environmental antibiotic-resistance in a way that cannot be accomplished by a single research group.
After Westerville students collected the soil, OSU students in Dr. Larson’s lab diluted the samples and applied them to culture plates pretreated with a variety of common antibiotics. Only those bacteria resistant to a particular antibiotic would then grow into colonies on the plates. The sealed plates were returned to AP Biology students who learned the process and were responsible for counting bacterial colonies and inputting counts into the database.
Manzo said, “Participation in this citizen science project allowed Westerville’s AP Biology students to be a part of authentic lab work contributing to a national research initiative. The experience also gave them insight into the career field of molecular genetics.”