about to wrap-it-up!

Last semester we encountered many difficulties trying to optimize our culture method. Due to that inconvenience, this Christmas vacation I engaged in another project in order to have a something to present in our poster day. I must I confess that we have achieve a great deal of progress this past month. We were even able to have some preliminary results and submitted an abstract for the ASM Conference, which will be held in Philadelphia this year. That being said, for this semester my primary goal is to sequence DNA we have extracted from clones that have a plasmid insert from microbial mats at the Cabo Rojo Salterns and find out which are the genes confer antibiotic resistance. Moreover, efforts are currently underway to determine the gene responsible for this activity and further determine if novel mechanisms for antibiotic resistance can be reported from these clones isolated from the Cabo Rojo salterns microbial mats.

This project is very similar to the one I was previously working on. I am still working a metagenomic library from the Cabo Rojo Salterns, but this time I am looking for antibiotic resistance instead of enzymes. Direct cloning of environmental DNA from the mats might have great potential for identifying new genes and gene products for biotechnological purposes particularly those conferring resistance to antibiotics.

We constructed a metagenomic library from the mats of the Candelaria lagoon. Genomic DNA was extracted from the Candelaria microbial mats using an indirect method, and a fosmid library of approximately 33,000 clones was generated in Escherichia coli as a host.

~ by Angel on January 28, 2009.