Summer is almost over, but do you ever wonder what microbes are possibly in your swimming pool? You may not know that some species can easily survive chlorine and can be abundant in public pools and water supplies.

Our newest publication is a collaborative research paper that found a new species of non-tuberculosis Mycobacterium in a public swimming pool in Omaha, Nebraska. Although these species do not cause tuberculosis, they can cause pulmonary diseases that resemble tuberculosis and are an emerging healthcare and community acquired infection. The CDC and FDA have an ongoing warning for NTMs and their potential harmful effects to individuals that are older, immunocompromised or have other medical conditions like open wounds, which makes this a timely and relevant discovery.

This research was a collaboration between a student from our Delfin summer research program, Daniela Hernandez-Velazquez from the Universidad Veracruzana (Mexico), a visiting student Rana Petre from the Erasmus University Brussels (Belgium), and one of own Bellevue University students, Maddy Vasquez, under the guidance of Dr. John Kyndt.

Maddy Vasquez initiated the study when she proposed to sequence the pool water for potential algal bloom contaminations. After sequencing and analysis of the samples, the team identified the new Mycobacterium species as the prominent bacterial species present in the samples. The presence of Mycobacterium in the pool itself is maybe not that surprising since it is known to be resistant to chlorine treatments, however the team also found that it contains multiple antibiotic resistance genes and the samples contained a unique bacteriophage, which makes it a unique system for further studies on phage-bacterial systems.

The study is published in the journal Microbiology Resource Announcements:

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mra.00896-24

If you are interested in joining projects like these, there are more student opportunities to join in this type of research. For more information contact Dr. John Kyndt (jkyndt@bellevue.edu).