Original Artwork by Ryder H.

Our project has been looking at the natural antibiotic discovery pipeline and how environmental microbes are a large contributor to currently used antibiotics. Environmental microbes commonly are antibiotic producers and use antibiotics as signals to communicate with each other and protect their niche. This means to discover novel antibiotics, looking at the microbe-to-microbe interactions is incredibly important.  Because of how important these interactions are, I chose to illustrate the environmental interactions of microbes and how this leads to discovering novel antibiotics. To do this, I used resin to create a layered soil environment showing the prevalence of microbes at each level and how they are vital to their ecosystem. I then made a resin crowded plate of soil microbes to show the microbial interactions in an easy to visualize way. I chose to use resin as my medium because I am a visual learner and seeing the bacterial interactions on the agar plate in the lab helped me better understand so I wanted to create a safe way for other people to visualize these interactions.