BashTheBug

Dancing, Germs, and the Challenge of Antimicrobial Resistance

We had a fantastic time this weekend at ATOM Festival in Abingdon, bringing microbiology to life with our Bash the Bug public engagement activities. With plenty of sunshine and a steady stream of curious visitors, it was the perfect setting to spark conversations about one of the biggest challenges in global health: antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

Over the course of the day, we were delighted to engage with around 300 visitors, all keen to get involved, learn something new, and test their knowledge.

Learning Through Play: Our AMR Dance Mat

One of the highlights of the day was our interactive dance mat game — which even attracted a visit from the town crier (a festival highlight in itself!).

The game invites participants to “treat” infections by firing antibiotics at germs. But there’s a twist: if you keep using the same antibiotic, the germs become resistant, and suddenly your treatment stops working. Players quickly learn that they need to switch drugs and think carefully about how they use antibiotics.

It’s a simple but powerful way to demonstrate a complex concept. AMR can often feel abstract, but when people experience it firsthand — even through a game — the message sticks: how we use antibiotics today affects how well they work tomorrow.

How Clean Are Your Hands?

We also challenged visitors to test their handwashing technique using Glo Gel and UV torches. After applying the gel and washing their hands, participants could see under UV light exactly where they had missed.

The results are always surprising. Commonly missed areas included around the nails, between fingers, and the backs of hands. These moments create a great opportunity to talk about how effective hand hygiene helps prevent the spread of infection — reducing the need for antibiotics in the first place.

It was particularly encouraging to hear feedback from families. One parent told us they loved that we were promoting important life skills like handwashing, highlighting how these simple messages resonate beyond the activity itself.

Conversations That Matter

What made the day especially rewarding was the level of engagement. Visitors of all ages got involved — asking thoughtful questions, sharing their own experiences, and taking time to understand why AMR matters.

Public engagement events like ATOM Festival are a vital part of our work. They allow us to connect directly with communities, break down complex scientific ideas, and empower people with knowledge that can make a real difference to health outcomes.

A Big Thank You

We’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who came to visit us, took part in our activities, and helped make the day such a success. And of course, to our amazing Bash the Bug team, whose enthusiasm and energy made it all possible.

We’re already looking forward to the next opportunity to get out into the community and continue the conversation about microbes, medicines, and the future of antibiotics.

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When patients suffer infections related to replaced knee or hip joints, medical teams need to know which bacteria are causing the problem. A promising new method called metagenomic sequencing reads all the DNA in a sample and can identify bacteria without needing them to grow in the lab.  This could be faster than standard tests, and might give more complete information.  However, these samples usually contain a lot of human DNA, which can “drown out” the bacterial DNA in the sequencing.

We tested a technique called adaptive sampling, which helps the sequencing machine ignore human DNA and focus on bacterial DNA instead. In samples from infected prosthetic joints, adaptive sampling increased the amount of bacterial genetic material we could read by about 1.5 to 2 times. The method didn’t introduce any obvious drawbacks, but the improvement was modest. We also saw some technical issues such low-level contamination that can complicate results.

Overall, adaptive sampling makes sequencing a bit more efficient, but it is not yet accurate, reproducible or powerful enough to replace standard lab tests. It may be a helpful extra tool, and larger studies are needed to confirm its value.

You can read our scientific paper for free here or by clicking the title below.

Teresa L. Street, Philip Bejon, Laura Leach, Sarah Oakley, Bernadette C. Young and Nicholas D. Sanderson. (2025) Nanopore adaptive sampling for bacterial identification from periprosthetic joint replacement tissue. Microbial Genomics. 11(9): 001507

You can listen to our very own Dr Bernadette Young talking about fluoroquinolones — these are a very valuable and widely-used class of antibiotics — on Episode 32 of the Communicable podcast. This prestigious podcast is published by the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) and hence is aimed at clinicians so will be technical and detailed, you have been warned!

My name is Akika Altman-Chandler, and I just graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in Human Sciences. For my undergraduate dissertation, I worked with Teresa Street at the Modernising Medical Microbiology (MMM) laboratory to investigate the influence of the gut microbiome on life expectancy. 

To investigate this, I traveled to Nagano, Japan. Nagano is a prefecture in Central/Northern Japan that consistently has the highest life expectancy in the country (87 for females, 83 for males). While there, I worked with the local government and a farming network to recruit residents from a background balanced by age and sex for a small study. In the study, participants completed a survey and provided a stool sample. The survey asked about participants’ age, sex, ethnicity, residential history, medical history, and dietary history. The stool samples were shipped to the MMM laboratory, where I extracted, quantified, qualified, sequenced, and statistically analysed the DNA from the bacteria within them.

One of the most interesting findings from the study was that the stool samples all seemed to have remarkably high Shannon diversity scores. Shannon diversity scores are a statistic that represent how many different species there are in a sample (species richness) and how evenly the different species are distributed (species evenness). In the context of the gut microbiome, high Shannon diversity scores indicate a diverse, balanced community of bacteria. In most populations, gut microbiome diversity scores fall in the range of 1.5-4.5. In this population, gut microbiome diversity scores fell in the range of 3.45-7.45— a range that ranks amongst the most diverse gut microbiomes on record.  After statistically analysing the information provided by participants in the survey, I found that the strongest predictor of Shannon diversity scores was dietary history. Participants who listed that they consumed foods that have been fermented, pickled, or washed in hot spring water at least once a week had diversity scores about 1.5 times higher than those who did not. 

This co-variation aligns with Nagano’s cultural practices. Nagano has long produced and consumed foods such as miso, natto, and tsukemono (including nozawana-zuke)). These foods are pre- or probiotic, meaning that they introduce different bacteria into the gut. A diverse gut microbiome can break down a broader range of foods, meaning that there are more molecules available for important physiological processes in your body— be it building muscle, fighting off infections, or repairing tissues. These factors culminate as a potential explanation for Nagano’s historically high life expectancy.

I am so thankful to have had the MMM’s laboratory support throughout this study. I learned so much about microbiology, molecular biology, and just generally about working in a lab. I would like to say a special thank you to Tree, Katie, Val, Nick, Hermione, Cat, and Ali, who taught me the ins and outs of research, as well as a thank you to Invitek Diagnostics and Oxford Nanopore Technologies, who sponsored the scientific equipment. 

Throughout the past three days doing work experience at MMM we’ve learnt about the different roles within the department, their responsibilities and contributions to research. After being briefed about a potential deadly outbreak in the MMM labs we were tasked with trying to identify the offending pathogen. Swabbing high contact points and warm areas such as our shoes, lab doors and keyboards we set about trying to culture the bacteria. Next we learnt how to use the streaking method to transfer the bacteria to our agar plates and create single colonies that we could later analyse. Examining the plates the next day, the coffee machine proved to be the incubator for the infection, the plates were crawling with enterococcus, coliforms and even a particularly large fungus. Luckily, Kate’s keyboard and Tree’s phone proved to be relatively clean.

We then took our sample to the OUH labs to try to figure out what groups the bacteria came from. Gram staining helped us with this, and so we doused our samples with purple, then orange then clear before finally red liquid. Examining them under the microscope allowed us to ascertain not only whether the bacteria were gram positive or gram negative, as illustrated by their purple or red colour, but also whether they were bacillus or cocci (rods or circles).

Throughout our placement we got a sense about the daily runnings of a lab, sitting in on a group talk on public engagement as well as hosting a journal club and recipient individual talks from different members of the team. Helen spoke to us about project management and her role within Oxford University, as well as the time she got invited to the American ambassadors 4th of July party! Though, she did assure us that this isn’t typical of a role in management. Ali talked to us about the green initiatives the lab is taking to try to improve their environmental sustainability such as recycling loops and pipette tips, and how they managed to achieve a silver in the green impact award and are now aiming for gold. Carlos talked to us about the computing side to the research and how the group works together so that everyone can do the roles their best at.

Highlights of our time at MMM included developing the dance mat game with Jo and Hieu, creating a new level for a local primary school that they are visiting soon, and creating agar art with Cat and Eloise, making some beautiful flowers!

We really enjoyed our time at MMM and can’t wait to join them some day!

Iris, Lori, Jess