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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

anitbiotic resistance, staphylococcus aureus, commercially available meat

College

Life Sciences

Department

Microbiology and Molecular Biology

Abstract

Bacteria can be found everywhere. While some bacteria can help humans to make medicine and clean up environmental disasters, other bacteria can cause horrible disease. After the discovery of antibiotics in the early twentieth century humans have been using them to treat human and animal disease. At first antibiotics very effective at clearing bacterial infections. Bacteria that were able to survive the antibiotics were able to spread and become more common. Bacteria have the ability to share genes and those genes are very favorable for the bacteria that have them. Today, animals are given more antibiotics than humans are. This massive use of antibiotics has created a situation where antibiotics may no longer effective and we don’t have a good way to treat disease. One such bacteria is known as MRSA, or Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA). MRSA is a specific type of Staphylococcus Aureus, and they are both detected by the same method. By measuring the level of antibiotic resistance in meat from grocery stores we hope to estimate the prevalence of Staphylococcus Aureus and Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus generated by the antibiotics use on the animals.

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