Trying to protect agriculture and preserve antibiotics—interview with Prof. Jennifer Ronholm
A major issue associated with antimicrobial resistance is the overuse and potential misuse of antibiotics in agriculture.
“We can't just stop farming without antibiotics tomorrow, because we still have to eat every day and without antibiotics, food prices would go up, and productivity would go down,” McGill Food Science and Agricultural Chemistry Professor Jennifer Ronholm, Canada Research Chair in agricultural microbiology, “We'd have shortages of a lot of things that we need. So, it's really bridging that gap to come up with the novel technologies that don't currently exist to be able to farm effectively and not affect human health through over consumption of antibiotics.”
Looking for novel ways to reduce antibiotics in the agricultural industry has been an area of focus for Ronholm.
“What we're trying to do is come up with ways that we can still farm effectively without using those antibiotics,” Ronholm said. “And we're trying to do this through manipulating the microbiome of animals, so making it really resistant to infections so we don't need those antibiotics in agriculture, and that would have the effect of lowering usage and saving the antibiotics for human use.”
Ronholm and her coinvestigators are working to profile a “healthy” microbiome and a microbiome that might be susceptible to bacterial infections, and identify microorganisms that protect against infection for potential use as probiotics.
After presenting at this week’s , Ronholm sat down with Contagion to discuss her ongoing work in this area.
“It has a lot of potential in agriculture, specifically because you control everything about the animals: you control their environment, you control their food. So, it might actually be more effective in agriculture than in humans.”