UMass Amherst Summer Pre-College: Antibiotic Resistance – A Global Health Crisis Recently Updated

 Join the Department of Microbiology in a two-week course-based research experience where you will work on research projects to discover new antibiotics. You will use modern biotechnology and chemistry techniques, as well as traditional microbiology methods to grow, identify, and characterize antibiotic-producing bacteria and their antibiotics.

You will work in a lab on a daily basis. Techniques that you will learn include sterile technique, growing bacteria, polymerase chain reaction, electrophoresis, chemical extraction of antibiotics, and DNA sequencing. We will cover concepts such as why antibiotics exist in the first place, how the antibiotic resistance crisis occurred, other non-antibiotic treatment options, how the pandemic made this situation worse, biopiracy/bioprospecting, and the role of scientists in educating the public on antibiotic resistance. At the end of the two weeks, you will share what you have learned about your strain with your classmates in a short presentation.