Bacteriophage

[deleted-297832]

I am doing a project based on the effectiveness of bacteriophage versus the effectiveness of antibiotics on a specific bacteria. The bacteria I will be using is E.coli and I was wondering what antibiotic would be the best choice to use?

I would appreciate your help, Thank You.

[deleted-288920]

Hi there!

We would be more than happy to help! Can you please explain a little more about your project and how you are planning on carrying out your experiments? Are you looking for antibiotics in disk form? I know Carolina biologics http://www.carolina.com/ sells some antibiotic disks, but not all are available for students and their parents to purchase. Do you have access to these disks through your school already? I believe the ones students/parents can purchase are the ones they have listed under economy http://www.carolina.com/microbiology-su ... _806493.pr.

Since I'm not sure of your specific project and how you are conducting your research, I would like to ask a few questions.
Are you looking to only test E. coli vs. 1 antibiotic and would like to know what one is effective in killing E. coli?
Are you looking to test multiple antibiotics and figure out what one is better in killing E. coli?

Please provide us with some additional information and we can provide additional guidance. Since you are planning on working with bacteria, if you haven't already, please check out https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ques.shtml to make sure you are working with the E. coli in a safe manner.

Good luck and please let us know how we can help more!

Nikki

[deleted-297832]

My experiment will be cultivating the E.coli bacterium in order to test whether bacteriophage or antibiotics are more effective. I will be using the Kirby-Bauer assay in order to test the antibiotic effectiveness on the bacteria and then I will be using the plaque assay method in order to test the phages effectiveness on the bacteria. My plan is to use one antibiotic vs. the bacteriophage and just compare both to see which of the two was more effective. I had amoxicillin in mind since I know that it is a common antibiotic used in the treatment of bacterial infections such as E.coli. Do you recommend using more than one antibiotic in order to truly see what the results are? If so, which would you recommend? All my supplies will be ordered by my biotechnology II teacher and will be used in a safe and correct manner in our schools bio lab.

I hope I was able to clarify a bit more what my project is about, Thank you for your response.

[deleted-288920]

Thank you for providing us with some more information! It's great that you have access to supplies from your teacher and in your school. You could definitely try out Amoxicillin and see how effective it is. Depending on the timing of your project and additional antibiotics you have access to, you could try a preliminary Kirby Bauer method with your E. coli strain and several different antibiotics to determine what one or ones work best and then use that going forward for your experiment.

As you also suggested, comparing two different antibiotics along with the bacteriophage might be interesting as well. To give you a little more information on antibiotics, as you may or may not know, there are different classes of antibiotics that have different methods of killing the bacteria cells. Amoxicillin for example works by inhibiting the cell wall. A different antibiotic (and I don't know if you have access to it) like ciprofloxacin works by causing damage to the DNA. These are just two examples, but something for you to think about is if you wanted to look at different antibiotics and how they compare to the bacteriophage.

Please keep us posted and if you have more questions!
Nikki