In collaboration with Dr. Pruden’s Lab at Virginia Tech, we are working on project funded by the CDC to identify critical barriers to antibiotic resistant ESKAPE pathogens (Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterococcus spp.) in a reclaimed water treatment train. To do this, we sample at each stage of treatment at a Florida and a Virginia reclaimed water treatment facility and use membrane filtration onto selective differential media with antibiotics for each pathogen. We then select isolates from these plates to confirm the species/genus, screen for target antibiotic resistance genes and test for multi-drug resistance using Kirby-Bauer Disk Susceptibility Testing. We also filter each sample for metagenomic analysis to create the “resistome” present and send samples for water chemistry analysis.

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