Document Type

Paper- Restricted to Campus Access

Publication Date

4-23-2020

Faculty Mentor

Mark Ellison and Anthony Lobo

Abstract

Antibiotic resistance is a growing concern in the treatment of bacterial infections. Carbon nanomaterials have been shown to be extremely useful in the therapeutic field as an alternative form of drug delivery. This research focuses on delivering ciprofloxacin to resistant strains of Escherichia coli with the use of carbon nanomaterial known as nanographene. This is synthesized into a nanographene oxide polyethylene glycol (NGO-PEG) attachment to increase compatibility with living tissues. Attaching ciprofloxacin to NGO-PEG allows the introduction of ciprofloxacin into bacterial cells. Ciprofloxacin was successfully dissolved in water to make a stock solution. Through 1H NMR analysis a successful attachment was observed and through UV-Vis spectra an attachment rate of 7.8mg of ciprofloxacin to 10mg NGO-PEG was calculated over multiple trials and attachment reactions. We determined a preliminary minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) range of both free ciprofloxacin and ciprofloxacin attached NGO-PEG to be 0-0.5 µg/mL and 0-2.0 µg/mL, respectively. Upon exposing ciprofloxacin to resistant strains of E. coli it was found that the strains had minimal resistance to ciprofloxacin, indicating a need for mutagenesis to increase ciprofloxacin resistance for future experiments. Investigation of coliforms from sewage influent was conducted to isolate ciprofloxacin-resistant strains and to search for efflux pump-encoding plasmids.

Comments

Presented as part of the Ursinus College Celebration of Student Achievement (CoSA) held April 23 – April 30, 2020.

The downloadable file is a PowerPoint slide presentation with recorded audio commentary.

Download

Restricted

Available to Ursinus community only.

Share

COinS