Currently there are approximately 17 million death annually from bacterial infections. A large part of this is due to how rapidly antibiotics are becoming ineffective. It is crucial that new antibiotics, and new ways to discover antibiotics, are found before existing treatments are ineffective. In the Wolfe research group we aim to solve this problem through natural product isolation. Four bacteria, designated as 615(unknown), 655(Serratia), 674(Serratia), and 699(unknown), have been found to produce antibiotic compounds in our in-house high throughput screen. Once growth and antibiotic compounds were optimized, the four bacteria were scaled up to 6L. The natural products were separated using liquid-liquid extraction, purified through column chromatography, and identified using IR/NMR/MS.
