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Professional societies and institutes have stressed the importance of a dialogue between scientists and the public over the past decades. Especially the life sciences include many highly relevant research topics pertaining not only to scientific progress but also to decision-making in society. Surprisingly, few educational researchers and biological scientists make interdisciplinary efforts to communicate life science topics to society in an adequate manner. In our project, scientists from evolutionary biology, medicine and biology education worked in an interdisciplinary manner to design an educational program to make scientific research on antibiotic resistance and cystic fibrosis accessible to students (ninth, tenth and eleventh graders). In this article, we explain the communication objectives from the science education researcher's and the life scientist's perspectives. We provide a systematic description of the co-design process, a step-by-step procedure and the link to the open-source-materials used in the course. We conclude with a reflection about the implementation in consideration of the two perspectives. In sum, our results highlight that the co-design approach provides an effective method of communicating current biomedical research to school students. Our description of the co-design-process can help future applications of this co-design approach when designing science outreach activities.

Background and Objectives: Cystic fibrosis patients suffer from chronic lung infections that require long-term antibiotic therapy. Pseudomonas readily evolve resistance, rendering antibiotics ineffective. In vitro experiments suggest that resistant bacteria may be treated by exploiting their collateral sensitivity to other antibiotics. Here, we investigate correlations of sensitivity and resistance profiles of Pseudomonas aeruginosa that naturally adapted to antibiotics in the cystic fibrosis lung., Methodology: Resistance profiles for 13 antibiotics were obtained using broth dilution, E-test and VITEK mass spectroscopy. Genetic variants were determined from whole-genome sequences and interrelationships among isolates were analyzed using 13 MLST loci., Result: Our study focused on 45 isolates from 13 patients under documented treatment with antibiotics. Forty percent of these were clinically resistant and 15% multi-drug resistant. Colistin resistance was found once, despite continuous colistin treatment and even though colistin resistance can readily evolve experimentally in the laboratory. Patients typically harbored multiple genetically and phenotypically distinct clones. However, genetically similar clones often had dissimilar resistance profiles. Isolates showed mutations in genes encoding cell wall synthesis, alginate production, efflux pumps and antibiotic modifying enzymes. Cross-resistance was commonly observed within antibiotic classes and between aminoglycosides and β-lactam antibiotics. No evidence was found for consistent phenotypic resistance to one antibiotic and sensitivity to another within one genotype., Conclusions and Implications: Evidence supporting potential collateral sensitivity in clinical P. aeruginosa isolates remains equivocal. However, cross-resistance within antibiotic classes is common. Colistin therapy is promising since resistance to it was rare despite its intensive use in the studied patients., (© The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Foundation for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health.)