Metagenome isolated from soil in an apple orchard in Wisconsin. soil metagenome

Pathogenic bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics cause many problems when it comes to the treatment of both human and agricultural diseases. The ability of antibiotic resistance to quickly spread among bacteria coupled with the decrease in the rate of discovery of novel antibiotics could have catastrophic effects on our ability to treat disease caused by bacteria. By understanding more about the types of antibiotic resistance genes in natural environments and the bacteria that harbor those genes, we hope to be better equipped to manage antibiotic resistance. Our study focuses on soil bacterial communities found in a southern Wisconsin apple orchard. Apple orchards worldwide are plagued by fire blight, a disease caused by the bacterium, Erwinia amylovora. In an effort to control this disease, farmers have resorted to spraying antibiotics on susceptible varieties of apple trees. The problem has become more complicated as strains of E. amylovora that are resistant to the antibiotic treatments have emerged. This genome project was created to explore the antibiotic resistance profile and bacterial community composition in an orchard where streptomycin is used to control the spread of fire blight. We hope to gain insight into the features of the bacterial community that have arisen as a result of repeated antibiotic treatment over a long period of time. We have used culture dependent and culture independent approaches to evaluate the bacterial community composition. We also used functional selections to identify antibiotic resistance genes present in this community. Functional metagenomic libraries were built from soil from an apple orchard in south central Wisconsin. These libraries are stored in Jo Handelsman's lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison ([e-mail]).