Welcome to my site!
My name is Angelina Ning, and I am a junior at American Heritage School Boca/Delray. I was first inspired to conduct research on antibiotic alternatives at the beginning of my sophomore year after reading many research papers on the growing issue of antibiotic resistance, especially in cases of infections involving biofilms. After finding that biofilm formation and maintenance was mainly attributed to a form of intercellular chemical communication known as quorum sensing, I sought an environmentally-friendly, low toxicity treatment that was capable of targeting quorum sensing between bacterial cells. In my first year of research, I used the Chinese herbal medicine Galla chinensis to treat both Gram-positive and Gram-negative biofilm and discovered that Gram-negative biofilm was more resistant. This year, I decided to expand on my previous year's research to see if combining Galla chinensis treatment with the naturally occurring, safe chemicals cinnamaldehyde and zinc would be able to inhibit Gram-negative biofilm of E. coli to biologically effective percentages and potentially even disperse well-established, preformed biofilm. Please click around my website to read my abstract, view my slideshow, watch my video, and contact me with any questions about my project!