BIOLOGY

INVESTIGATORY
PROJECT
THE STUDY OF EFFECTS OF ANTIBIOTICS ON MICRO-
ORGANISMS

NAME: SAMANWITHA SHARMA B.G

CLASS: XI ‘A’
ROLL NO.: 16
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to my teacher, Smt. PREETHA. O who given me
the opportunity to do this wonderful investigatory project on the topic: ‘THE STUDY OF EFFECTS OF
ANTIBIOTICS ON MICRO-ORGANISM’, which helped me to explore in new things. I am very thankful
to thank the lab attender, Smt. ANJANA for the support and cooperation. Secondly, I would like to
thank my parents and friends who helped me a lot in finalizing this project within the limited time
frame.
INDEX:

 INTRODUCTION

 EXPERIMENT

 BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION

Antibiotics are among the most successful drugs used in human therapy. In addition, they have been
used for several decades in animal growth promotion, prophylaxis, metaphylaxis, treatment, and
general farming production. This wide antibiotic use has led to different habitats becoming polluted
by a large range of concentrations of antibiotics.

An Antibiotic is a type of antimicrobial substance active against bacteria and is the most important
type of antibacterial agent for fighting bacterial infections. Antibiotic medications are widely used in
the treatment and prevention of such infections. They may either kill or inhibit the growth of
bacteria. A limited number of antibiotics also possess antiprotozoal activity. Antibiotics are not
effective against viruses such as the common cold or influenza; drugs which inhibit viruses are
termed antiviral drugs or antivirals rather than antibiotics.

Antibiotics are the chemical compounds that are used to control microbial population and diseases
caused by them. There are two modes of operations for antibiotics:

• Bactericidal

• Bacteriostatic
Antibiotics are majorly used to control bacterial growth and to treat infections caused by them. They
can also give us information out about bacteria which shows anti-microbial resistance.

PHYTOCHEMICALS

Plants are an important source of antimicrobial compounds and traditional healers have long used to
plants to prevent or cure infectious diseases. There is a recent renewed interest into the use of
natural products for the identification of new members of the ‘antibiotic-ome’, and their application
in antibacterial drug discovery in the genomics era. Phytochemicals are the active biological
component of plants and some phytochemicals including tannins, alkaloids, terpenoids, and
flavonoids possess antimicrobial activity. Some antioxidant dietary supplements also contain
phytochemicals , such as grape seed extract , and demonstrate invitro and anti-bacterial properties.
Phytochemicals are able to inhibit peptidoglycan synthesis, damage microbial membrane structures,
modify bacterial membrane surface hydrophobicity and also modulate quorum sensing. With
increasing antibiotic resistance in recent years, the potential of new plant-derived antibiotics is
under investigation.
Multi-hierarchical antibiotic selection of bacterial populations

Since antibiotics are naturally produced compounds, it is expected that environmental microbial
populations have adopted along their evolution to the presence of the natural concentrations of
these antimicrobials. However, the constant discharge of antibiotics in nature may alter this
homeostasis. Particularly important are the allocations in which antibiotic concentrations are higher:
treated patients and animals. Other habitats in which high-level concentrations of antibiotics can be
found are waste-water treatment plants or rivers receiving domestic, hospital, farm and industrial
waters, soil at farms, water and sludge at fish farms, and manure. In all cases, antibiotics can affect
the structure of bacterial populations at different levels. First will be the population composition
itself. Any bacterial species has a characteristic level of susceptibility to any given antimicrobial,
which has been dubbed “intrinsic resistance”. This means that, for any given concentration of
antibiotic, a part of the population present in the microbiota will be inhibited and another part will
consequently increase their abundance. It is expected that a strong stressor will reduce diversity,
and this is likely to be true when the concentrations of the inhibitor are high. However, mild
concentrations of antibiotics may produce an apparent increase in biodiversity, or at least the
emergence of new taxons whose presence was minor before antibiotics stress, if the most
predominant species present in the microbiome are susceptible and hence inhibited by such
concentrations. The most detailed studies of the effect of antibiotics on the global composition of
the microbiota have been performed studying the gut microbiota of humans and of experimental
mammal models as well.
PENICILLIN - The first miracle antibiotic
AIM – To study the effects of antibiotics in micro-organism

THEORY – Antibiotics are the organic secretions produced by micro-organism, which in low
concentration are antagonistic to the growth of other micro-organism. Antibiotics have proved very
useful in combating several bacterial diseases in man and animals. Antibiotics are commonly
obtained from actinomycetes and some bacteria. Some of the important antibiotics are
streptomycin, aureomycin, terremycin, chloromycetin, erythromycin, neomycin.

Soil is a natural medium that harbours several types of micro-organisms. These micro-organisms can
be grown on culture medium. This is an important subject. Therefore the study of antibiotics on
micro-organism has been taken for the presence project.

MATERIALS REQUIRED – Potato, agar, dextrose, beef, peptone, NaCl, sodium carbonate, distilled
water, five different types of antibiotics, syringe, oven sterilized petri dishes, flasks, beakers, pipette,
garden soil, glass marker pen, etc.
PROCEDURE –

A. Preparation of culture medium:

1. Potato dextrose agar (PDA) medium:

Take 200g of peeled potato chips. Boil them with 500ml of water in a beaker for 15
minutes. Squeeze the potato pulp thus obtained through a muslin cloth and keep it in a
flask. Take 20g of agar in a beaker and warm it with 500ml of water. Mix both the
solutions of potato and agar and add 20g dextrose in it. Thus one litre of PDA medium is
prepared.

Autoclave the medium at 15 pounds pressure for 15 minutes.

2. Meat extract agar medium:

Weih 3g beef extract, 10g peptone, 5g and mix these in 1 litre of