2021 Tiny Earth@McGill undergraduate summer studentship awards

The McGill AMR Center, the Department of MIMM and MI4 are pleased to announce the 2021 Tiny Earth @McGill undergraduate summer studentship awards.

Supported by generous donations during McGill24 last year, four awards of $2000 each will be awarded to undergraduate students to provide support towards the stipends, to pursue research related to antimicrobial discovery and resistance during the summer 2021.

The winners and their research projects:

Evelyne Cote will be screening bacterial isolates taken from the Artic for antimicrobial activity and preexisting antibiotic resistance. I will also check if these isolates show any activity against food fungal pathogens and the non-virulent strains of human fungal pathogens. If any isolates do show these activities, I will sequence their DNA to find the gene responsible.

Alex Resendes will be working on the limitations in current antibiotic susceptibility tests compromise proper treatment selection. In this project, bacterial growth of Vancomycin-resistant and Vancomycin-susceptible strains of Enterococcus faecalis will be analyzed in the presence and absence of this antibiotic. The goal is to determine the incubation time needed to detect the presence/absence of resistant bacteria in clinical samples.

Bridget O’Brien: The transmission of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria from livestock into the food chain poses a significant threat to public health, especially considering the widespread use of antibiotics on farms. My project consists of isolating bacteria from the gastrointestinal tracts of chickens in order to identify novel probiotics that ultimately can be used in the poultry industry to reduce dependency on antibiotics.

James Cyr's project focuses on bacteria and bacteria-infecting viruses, known as bacteriophages, in the human gut. We will be studying how bacteriophages contribute to the transfer of genes between bacteria, specifically genes coding for antimicrobial resistance.