UW-Green Bay students helping in worldwide effort to develop new antibiotics

GREEN BAY, Wis. (WFRV) College students at UW-Green Bay are helping in a worldwide effort to develop new life-saving antibiotics. As Kris Schuller reports the Tiny Earth project is out to help solve a growing crisis. For the past 14 weeks college students at UWGB like Carolyn LaTour – have been looking through soil samples searching for bacteria which hopefully one day leads to new antibiotics.

“Discovering new and different antibiotics will definitely help the medical field a lot,” said LaTour.

LaTour and her classmates are participating in the Tiny Earth program. It’s an international effort involving 10,000 students from 300 colleges – all aimed at discovering new antibiotics by searching the ground under our feet.

“There are infections caused by bacteria from which nothing on the shelf works anymore,” said LaTour’s professor, Brian Merkel.

The students collected soil samples from a variety of spots; compost piles, at their family home and in LaTour’s case. More from Merkel at WFRV-TV.