Department Surface Waters - Research and Management

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is rising in our aquatic environments and commonly tied to anthropogenic contamination from our urban infrastructure.
There remains a need to study the fate of AMR in freshwater environments with linkages to their urban infrastructure sources. However, studying AMR is an analytically challenging problem due to thousands of antibiotic resistance genes present in the resistome.
Researchers have successfully leveraged metagenomics to gain insight into this resistome, but challenges remain. Namely, developing more practical applications for wastewater or environmental surveillance and better understanding dynamics in complex environments. To overcome these challenges, methodological innovation is required both in detecting AMR at low concentration and for developing a model guided sampling and interpretation approach.

To tackle these limitations, this proposal focuses on two primary aspects: 

1. Leveraging next-generation sequencing for environmental AMR surveillance. 
2. Developing a new paradigm for studying the fate of microbial contamination in lake systems using Lagrangian-modeling guided study design.