 Over the past decade, antibiotic resistance in bacteria has become an enormous problem throughout the world. In fact, in the United States alone, it's predicted that nearly 2 million individuals per year will become infected with an antibiotic-resistant organism, 23,000 of which will succumb to their infection. Before we can address this issue, we must first gain a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms behind antibiotic resistance in bacteria. One of these mechanisms is through the acquisition of an antibiotic-resistant gene. For instance, the KPC gene confers resistance to a very specific class of antibiotics known as carbapenems. This is very worrisome, as carbapenems are typically utilized as an antibiotic of last resort, meaning they are used once everything else has failed. Now generally, when a KPC gene is on a bacterial's chromosome, this will result in full carbapenem resistance. However, that's not always the case. To demonstrate this, we expose three clinically relevant bacterial species to varying levels of carbapenem antibiotics. Each one of these species contained the KPC gene on their genome. The four carbapenem antibiotics were meri-pennem, dory-pennem, im-pennem, and ur-pennem. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the species tested exhibited full carbapenem resistance. But what was surprising was that nearly a quarter of the isolates tested exhibited either intermediate resistance or remained completely susceptible to the carbapenem antibiotics. Now intuitively, you may think this is a good thing, that despite having the KPC gene on the genome, the bacterium remains susceptible to the carbapenems. However, this can actually be very bad and let me explain how. Currently, to detect carbapenem-resistant bacteria, the bacteria are placed on a medium containing a carbapenem antibiotic. Therefore, these KPC-positive, but carbapenem-sensitive organisms will go undetected. And what we don't know, and what I would like to determine, is after continued exposure to low levels of carbapenem antibiotics, can these organisms evolve full resistance? Indeed, studies have shown that after continued exposure to sub-lethal levels of an antibiotic, the bacteria can create mutations on its genome which can confer full resistance to that antibiotic. Therefore, my plan is to utilize whole genome sequencing before and after antibiotic exposure in an attempt to identify these genetic mutations, which can then be potentially used as a screening tool to identify bacteria that are primed to become fully resistant to carbapenems, effectively catching the problem bugs before they even become a problem.