• Question: @Donna are you currently researching stuff at the place where you work?

    Asked by Patrick Dumitrache to Donna on 13 Jun 2017. This question was also asked by Adrian Bouaru.
    • Photo: Donna Johnson

      Donna Johnson answered on 13 Jun 2017:

      I am. I’m looking at the genetic pathways that are involved in the development of resistance to an antimicrobial called triclosan. It’s in a lot of cleaning and antibacterial products and when bacteria become resistant to triclosan, they can become resistant to antibiotics as well. If this happens in a hospital, it can mean that we have a higher level of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the environment, which can be picked up by already sick people.
      What i want to find out is if any of the genetic pathways involved would be good ones to target for drug development and just to add to the knowledge of resistance in general. I got to use some next generation sequencing recently (sequencing all of the genes at the same time) to look at the genome which was very cool 🙂

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