What's in the Water?

Rivers are a fantastic natural resource, providing water for people, wildlife, and farming. They can be thriving ecosystems and a valuable leisure resource, but, repeated frequent discharges of sewage into our waterways threatens all this. Using an innovative citizen science approach, we recruited members of the public to sample their local waterways and send the water to our labs for analysis. We looked at levels of antibiotics and numbers of gut associated bacteria in the water, as well as looking for antibiotic resistance and found intriguing patterns of resistance.

‘Antibiotic resistance’. You have likely seen this phrase in the media. But what does it mean? To put it simply, antibiotics no longer work. This threatens the collapse of modern medicine and a return to the days where a cut could be fatal. However, there is hope of avoiding such a crisis. This talk will address the following: what antibiotics are, why they no longer work and why, despite all the gloomy forecasts, there is hope.

Microbes frequently exist as communities inside the human body and across natural environments. Although some microbes cause disease, many are important in sustaining life on Planet Earth. Photosynthesising cyanobacteria- the first oxygen-generating organisms- contribute to approximately 50% of global primary production. Whilst technically unicellular, cyanobacteria can build multi-cellular structures such as sticky balls and mats, inhabited by a variety of different bacteria. Exploring how these microbes communicate with each other is vital to understand their collective productivity.