Wadsworth receives NIH award to study antibiotic resistance

Rochester, New York – Antibiotic resistance continues to grow as one of the most serious threats in modern public health, with scientists warning that some infections are becoming harder, and in some cases nearly impossible, to treat. As multidrug-resistant bacteria spread globally, researchers are racing to understand how these organisms evolve and how that evolution can be slowed or stopped.

At the Rochester Institute of Technology, Associate Professor Crista Wadsworth from the Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences is taking on part of that challenge. She has received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study antibiotic resistance within a group of bacteria known as Neisseria. The project focuses on tracking how resistance develops and spreads among different species in this genus.

Within Neisseria, two species stand out as major human pathogens: Neisseria gonorrhea and Neisseria meningitidis. Both can cause severe disease, but gonorrhea in particular has raised urgent concern among scientists due to its growing resistance to available treatments.

“Antibiotic resistance in gonorrhea is a huge problem,” said Wadsworth. “The pathogen has evolved resistance to every single drug we have to treat it. It’s a scary pathogen if you’re not able to treat it because it can infect brains, infect the heart, and cause death. There’s no vaccine for gonorrhea, either.”

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Her research builds on earlier work from her postdoctoral studies, where she discovered that gonorrhea can acquire resistance genes from harmless relatives that naturally live in the human mouth. These so-called commensal Neisseria species include around ten different types of bacteria that are typically harmless and rarely studied in detail.

“I found a resistance gene in Neisseria gonorrhea that had been acquired from these commensal species,” said Wadsworth. “My lab is trying to characterize them better. We’re going to sample commensal Neisseria and we are going to test what’s called their minimum inhibitory concentration to different clinically relevant antibiotics.”

The goal of this work is to better understand whether these harmless bacteria carry resistance traits that could be transferred to more dangerous pathogens. By studying how different species respond to antibiotics, researchers hope to identify patterns that explain how resistance emerges in the first place.

Another important part of the project involves sequencing bacterial genomes. This allows scientists to connect observed resistance behaviors with specific genetic mutations or genotypes that may be responsible. Over time, this information could help improve how doctors predict and respond to antibiotic-resistant infections.

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Beyond the scientific discoveries, the NIH award also supports a strong educational mission. A key requirement of the grant is the involvement of undergraduate students in hands-on research, giving them direct experience in microbiology and public health science.

“One of the additional goals of the grant is to train undergraduates and have them help answer a really important public health question,” said Wadsworth. “It’s a really good system to train students, and I’ve also integrated this research into the classroom. I have a lab full of undergraduates. It’s a huge component of what I do at RIT.”

Through this combination of research and education, Wadsworth’s work aims not only to address a growing global health threat but also to prepare the next generation of scientists who will continue the fight against antibiotic resistance.