hello, i am amulya baral.

Bacteria can develop the ability to survive antibiotics, making infections harder (sometimes impossible) to treat. This could be anything from enzymes that cut antibiotics in half to pumps that throw antibiotic molecules right back out of the cell! Antibiotic resistant infections cause over a million deaths per year globally, and the number is rising. In my work, I look at what, how many, where and why resistance-producing genes are present in bacteria in different places like soil, sewage, and even cattle poop!

There are tons of bacteria living everywhere. Bacteria, like us, have DNA. When you take a scoop of soil for example, dissolve and crush all the bacteria in it, you can then take all of their DNA out and "sequence it" without necessarily having to grow them in the lab. You can then use that DNA data to look at all sorts of things - which bacteria live there, how many, which genes are present, which bacteria are carrying which genes (this is the hard part) and all sorts of fun things. That's what shotgun metagenomics is.