Optimizing Small World Initiative service learning by focusing on antibiotics-producing actinomycetes from soil

Draft Genome Sequences of Three Antibiotic-Producing Soil Bacteria, Staphylococcus pasteuri WAM01, Peribacillus butanolivorans WAM04, and Micrococcus yunnanensis WAM06, with Growth-Inhibiting Effects against Commensal Neisseria Strains

We report the isolation, identification, and assemblies of three antibiotic-producing soil bacteria ( Staphylococcus pasteuri , Peribacillus butanolivorans , and Micrococcus yunnanensis ) that inhibit the growth of Neisseria commensals in coculture. With pathogenic Neisseria strains becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, bioprospecting for novel antimicrobials using commensal relatives may facilitate discovery of clinically useful drugs.

Absence makes the mind grow stronger - Educating in a pandemic and beyond

With more than one academic year into the pandemic, it is timely to consider the lessons we learnt, and how they could shape education in the future. Papers from around the globe, reflecting on the directions we took and could take, were published in the FEMS Microbiology Letters virtual Thematic Issue 'Educating in a pandemic and beyond' in October 2021. Its content is reviewed here to facilitate discussions within the professional community. Online platforms and tools, that allowed a rapid emergency response, are covered, as well as enhancing student engagement, complementing and blending in-person activities with online elements for more flexible and accessible learning opportunities, the need for educator training, and improving science literacy overall and microbiology literacy specifically. As we go forward, in order to benefit from blended and flexible learning, we need to select our approaches based on evidence, and mindful of the potential impact on learners and educators. Education did not only continue during the pandemic, but it evolved, leading us into the future.

The Potential Role of School Citizen Science Programs in Infectious Disease Surveillance: A Critical Review

Public involvement in science has allowed researchers to collect large-scale and real-time data and also engage citizens, so researchers are adopting citizen science (CS) in many areas. One promising appeal is student participation in CS school programs. In this literature review, we aimed to investigate which school CS programs exist in the areas of (applied) life sciences and if any projects target infectious disease surveillance. This review’s objectives are to determine success factors in terms of data quality and student engagement. After a comprehensive search in biomedical and social databases, we found 23 projects. None of the projects found focused on infectious disease surveillance, and the majority centered around species biodiversity. While a few projects had issues with data quality, simplifying the protocol or allowing students to resubmit data made the data collected more usable. Overall, students at different educational levels and disciplines were able to collect usable data that was comparable to expert data and had positive learning experiences. In this review, we have identified limitations and gaps in reported CS school projects and provided recommendations for establishing future programs. This review shows the value of using CS in collaboration with traditional research techniques to advance future science and increasingly engage communities.

Service-Learning, Movies, and Infectious Diseases: Implementation of an Active Educational Program in Microbiology as a Tool for Engagement in Social Justice

Service-Learning is an educational methodology that allows student learning while addressing community needs. A program in microbiology and infectious diseases was implemented in Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. University lecturers, clinical microbiologists, doctorate students, and undergraduates from several Bachelor Degrees and courses worked in an interdisciplinary team along with social institutions that attend disadvantaged persons. Using commercial movies that deal with infectious diseases, the students learn clinical microbiology, prepare divulgation materials, visit social centers to accompany, and help others to know about illnesses and prevention. The program was developed through two academic years and involved 58 voluntary students, 13 teachers and tutors, and 4 social entities as community partners. Postsurvey evaluation of the program revealed a highly satisfactory achievement of goals: acquiring scientific and personal competencies by university students, including critical analysis and science diffusion, solving problems or collaborative team working, and contributing, together with the tutors, to the social responsibility of the university.

Teaching microbiology in times of plague

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed several challenges and strains at all levels of the educational system, especially as a consequence of lockdown and social distance measures. After a period of exclusive use of the online educational environment, educators have adapted to the new circumstances and, by a combination of different strategies, have fought to overcome the limitations and deficiencies of virtual learning. Student motivation, productivity, and creativity continue to be the main pedagogical issues that have to be reached with the new didactic tools developed during the pandemic. At the same time, this pandemic has shown the importance of the inclusion of microbiology as a core element of the educational curriculum and the opportunity to raise public awareness of the importance of microbes to everyday life.

MicroMundo@UPorto: an experimental microbiology project fostering student's antimicrobial resistance awareness and personal and social development

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global societal challenge requiring the contribution of professionals along with general community citizens for their containment. Portugal is one of the European countries where a lack of knowledge on the correct use of antimicrobials and AMR problematic is preeminent. Moreover, youth demotivation to pursue science careers is emerging. To address these problems an innovative experimental service-learning pedagogical strategy, MicroMundo@UPorto, was implemented in Portugal during 2018 through University of Porto as a partner of the global Citizen Science project 'Tiny Earth' responding to the AMR crisis. In this first edition of MicroMundo@UPorto, university students (n = 41; Pharmaceutical Sciences and Nutrition Sciences) organized in eight teams tutored by university professors/researchers (n = 13) on Microbiology and AMR theoretical and practical aspects as well on communication skills to enable their guidance of younger school students (n = 140/3 schools) in experiments to discover antimicrobial-producing microorganisms while exploring the soil microbial diversity. Post-survey-based evaluation revealed that this project allowed university students to acquire diverse personal, social and scientific skills while increasing AMR awareness, in the One-Health perspective, and interest for science in school students. This University to Society approach can be successfully extended across Portugal and for education in Microbiology in general, with benefits for the future generations contributing to socially responsible and scientifically-literate citizens.

Implementation of Antibiotic Discovery by Student Crowdsourcing in the Valencian Community Through a Service Learning Strategy

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.

MicroMundo Upside Down: Targeted Searching for Antibiotics-Producing Bacteria From Soil With Reverse Antibiosis Approaches

Tiny Earth (TE) is a popular international citizen science program aimed at improving public awareness on the growing antimicrobial resistance problem of which MicroMundo Albacete is a Spanish node. With a protocol that is focused on the isolation of antibiotics-producing actinomycetes from soil, 70% of the high school students in MicroMundo Albacete 2020 isolated colonies with antagonistic activity against Gram-positive tester bacteria. However, no activity was found against Gram-negative bacteria. Here, we further adapted the protocol toward a more targeted screening that also enables isolation of antagonistic bacteria against Gram negatives using two different reverse-antibiosis approaches involving a spraying technique or flipping soil sample disks upside down. Exploiting the soil samples from MicroMundo Albacete 2020, the new approaches yielded isolation of actinomycete bacteria with antagonistic activity against Gram-negative as well as Gram-positive tester bacteria. We propose that (educational) science programs which aim to search for antibiotic-producing bacteria may implement these approaches in their protocol to promote a successful and stimulating outcome of the experiment for the participating students.