7.4 Looking closer to home
Scientists are also bioprospecting closer to home and looking at samples taken from everyday objects and places. A bioprospecting project which recruited thousands of people to help is described in Activity 8.
Activity 8 Citizen Science ‘Swab and Send’ project
Timing: Allow about 10 minutes
First, listen to the following interview with Dr Adam Roberts about the ‘Swab and Send’ project [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Listen from 13:35 to 21:00.
Now answer the following questions.
- What is ‘Swab and Send’?
- What sort of samples have the swabs come from?
- Have any new antibiotics been identified through this initiative?
Answer
- It is a crowd-funded Citizen Science project to get members of the public involved in the discovery of new antibiotics.
- Anything and everything, including dead bald eagles, workplace objects, faeces and train tickets.
- Yes. Twenty candidates have been discovered that can kill multidrug resistant E. coli and the yeast Candida albicans or MRSA.