Abstract
Antibiotic misuse is a public health problem due to the appearance of resistant strains in almost all human pathogens, making infectious diseases more difficult to treat. The search for solutions requires the development of new antimicrobials as well as novel strategies, including increasing social awareness of the problem. The Small World Initiative (SWI) and the Tiny Earth (TE) network are citizen science programs pursuing the discovery of new antibiotics from soil samples and the promotion of scientific culture. Both programs aim to bring scientific culture and microbiological research closer to pre-university students through a crowdsourcing strategy and a Service Learning (SL) educational approach, with a 2-fold objective: to encourage students to pursue careers in science and to involve them in the discovery of soil microorganisms producing new antimicrobials. SWI and TE projects were put into practice in Spain under the common name MicroMundo. MicroMundo@Valencia was implemented at the Universitat de València (UV) during the academic years 2017–2018 and 2018–2019. It trained 140 university students to disseminate this initiative into 23 high/secondary schools, and one primary school, involving about 900 people (teachers and students) as researchers. A total of 7,002 bacterial isolates were obtained from 366 soil samples and tested for antibiosis at UV and high/secondary school centers. About 1 or 7% of them produced inhibition halos for the Escherichia coli or Bacillus cereus target strains, respectively. Geolocation of sampling sites by an application developed ad hoc and Kriging analysis also allowed detection of soil foci of antibiotic-producing bacteria. Evaluation of the project by university, high/secondary, and primary school students revealed their strong positive perception and their increased interest in science, as a consequence of acquiring new scientific and pedagogical concepts and skills that they were able to pass on to other classmates, younger students, or relatives. To further expand the dissemination of the project in the Valencian Community, diverse extramural activities deemed to include a gender perspective and aimed at different age groups, were also carried out, obtaining very satisfactory results, increasing sensitivity and awareness to the global antibiotic crisis.
Highlights
Antibiotics are one of the greatest discoveries of modern medicine and, during the first decade, carried away by the success, health professionals were not aware of the fragility of that medical breakthrough
Service Learning in microbiology courses is a teaching methodology that involves the participation of university and school students in research with the aim to improve their education and science interest as well as the community’s health (Webb, 2017)
Two research-based programs focused on student discovery of novel soil microorganisms potentially producing new antibiotics, Small World Initiative (SWI), and Tiny Earth (TE), started in Spain in 2017 and 2018, respectively, under the current common name MicroMundo
Summary
Antibiotics are one of the greatest discoveries of modern medicine and, during the first decade, carried away by the success, health professionals were not aware of the fragility of that medical breakthrough. The solution requires the development of new antimicrobial drugs acting through new mechanisms and aiming to new targets (Mulani et al, 2019; Wang et al, 2020) but it demands additional new strategies able to pave the way to move forward, like the establishment of adequate antibiotic stewardship policies within the medical community as well as raising social awareness of the magnitude of the problem we have to tackle This is where initiatives such as the Small World Initiative (SWI), a citizen science project pursuing to discover new antibiotics and promote scientific culture, that originated in 2012 at Yale University (United States; Hernandez et al, 2015), or the Tiny Earth (TE) network, an educational program headed by the UW-Madison’s Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (United States), initiated in 2018, that strives to forge a network of instructors and students focused on student-sourcing antibiotic discovery from soil, may become crucial when it comes to raising the much needed community awareness. Due to the large number of students who applied to participate in the project, a selection was made
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
