Mr Divine Shyntum

PhD Student

Research Interests

For my MSc I studied antimicrobial resistance trends in E.coli and Salmonella isolated from fecal samples in Southern United States. We wanted to test the hypothesis that multi-drug resistance patterns are not associated with antibiotic usage in animal farming. The premise of the study stemmed from the debate on whether or not antibiotic use in animal farming is responsible for multi-drug resistance patterns we see in clinical setting and if that is the case then antibiotics used on humans should not be used in animal farming .For this study we used twelve clinically important antibiotics and did an antibiogram on samples isolated from Elk and free range cattle from Northern New Mexico and feedlot cattle from Amarilo-Texas. Antibiotic resistance patterns were similar for most of the antibiotics which led us to conclude that other factors play a role in the increase resistance patterns we see in clinical settings probably horizontal gene transfer, over use and subtherapeutic usage and not necessarily antibiotic usage in animal setting.

For my PhD I am interested in understanding pathogenicity and host specificity factors in the plant pathogen Pantoea ananatis. P. ananatis is a Gram-negative facultative anaerobe belonging to the family Enterobacteriacae. In South Africa, the pathogen has been identified to cause diseases of economically important plants such as maize, onion and Eucalyptus. Initial pathogenicity trials have shown that some strains of P. ananatis were capable of infecting more than one host while others were host specific. The sequenced strain LMG20103 revealed the presence of the type VI secretion. The exact role of T6SS in the virulence of bacterial pathogens is not known but has been shown to secrete and release effectors into human cells (Suarez et al. 2007). This efflux system could be the major conduit for effectors and thus play a key role in the pathogenicity of P.ananatis. Understanding the biology of this pathogen will shed some light into how it causes disease and survives in different hosts.