Salmonella was the main focus of our lab this semester, so I don’t know a whole lot about other bacteria that may be practical in the lab. However, when I was doing research on Resveratrol, I do believe I saw that one study that mentioned testing Resveratrol with E.coli, which is another gram negative rod shaped bacterium similar to Salmonella, so I’d think that would be a great place to start!
This is because Salmonella Typhi, the one that shows symptoms in humans, is dangerous to work with in the lab! We want to reduce risk while we’re doing testing, and Salmonella Typhimurium shows these symptoms in mice (which are genetically pretty similar to us) so it works as a good model for testing how it may respond in a human without putting ourselves at risk! We also test plates at human body temperature to help simulate human conditions, to help keep our testing relevant to human conditions in that way too.
How would you re-do the inconclusive result from the negative control of figure 2? Is it necessary to have a conclusive result to determine the antibacterial effect?
Good question! So we would have to make another plate in the exact same way as we set it up in figure 2, but with a new negative control of DMSO at a lower concentration. We kind of did this in figure 3, we just changed the dilution series as well. Our DMSO was just a little bit wonky and so we fixed that problem in figure 3! And yes, a conclusive result is important to determine an antibacterial effect. Because our DMSO failed in our second figure, all the lines from our dilutions after it were not accurate data, so it told us nothing about how the antibacterial properties of resveratrol!
Great job! One question I had was if you ended up getting more conclusive results, do you know what the significance of these results would be or how could they be used in further research?
Yes! So if we had more conclusive results, we’d be able to know if Resveratrol or trans-resveratrol had promise for possesses antibacterial properties, meaning that it could undergo more testing to see if it would work as a viable antibiotic or part of an antibiotic, which is exciting! If Resveratrol or trans-Resveratrol had more clearly suggested that it promoted bacterial growth, we could conclude that Resveratrol did not possess antibacterial properties and may, in fact, be something to avoid if you have an antibacterial disease, so you don’t promote their growth!
Other than Salmonella Typhimurium, do you know of other species that could be used in this type of research?
Salmonella was the main focus of our lab this semester, so I don’t know a whole lot about other bacteria that may be practical in the lab. However, when I was doing research on Resveratrol, I do believe I saw that one study that mentioned testing Resveratrol with E.coli, which is another gram negative rod shaped bacterium similar to Salmonella, so I’d think that would be a great place to start!
Why would you research this Salmonella strain that shows symptoms in mice and not humans?
This is because Salmonella Typhi, the one that shows symptoms in humans, is dangerous to work with in the lab! We want to reduce risk while we’re doing testing, and Salmonella Typhimurium shows these symptoms in mice (which are genetically pretty similar to us) so it works as a good model for testing how it may respond in a human without putting ourselves at risk! We also test plates at human body temperature to help simulate human conditions, to help keep our testing relevant to human conditions in that way too.
How would you re-do the inconclusive result from the negative control of figure 2? Is it necessary to have a conclusive result to determine the antibacterial effect?
Good question! So we would have to make another plate in the exact same way as we set it up in figure 2, but with a new negative control of DMSO at a lower concentration. We kind of did this in figure 3, we just changed the dilution series as well. Our DMSO was just a little bit wonky and so we fixed that problem in figure 3! And yes, a conclusive result is important to determine an antibacterial effect. Because our DMSO failed in our second figure, all the lines from our dilutions after it were not accurate data, so it told us nothing about how the antibacterial properties of resveratrol!
Great job! One question I had was if you ended up getting more conclusive results, do you know what the significance of these results would be or how could they be used in further research?
Yes! So if we had more conclusive results, we’d be able to know if Resveratrol or trans-resveratrol had promise for possesses antibacterial properties, meaning that it could undergo more testing to see if it would work as a viable antibiotic or part of an antibiotic, which is exciting! If Resveratrol or trans-Resveratrol had more clearly suggested that it promoted bacterial growth, we could conclude that Resveratrol did not possess antibacterial properties and may, in fact, be something to avoid if you have an antibacterial disease, so you don’t promote their growth!