Droplet microfluidics for detection of bacterial heteroresistance

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Project Description

Antibiotic resistance is a serious medical challenge that puts patients at risk of untreatable bacterial infections and threatens major advances in modern medicine that rely on antibiotics. To tackle this problem, innovative diagnostic tools are required to rapidly identify resistances and choose the correct antibiotic for treatment. A challenge with identifying if the cells are susceptible or resistant to the antibiotics prescribed is that a population of bacterial cells can show heterogeneity and transient changes in terms of their susceptibility to the antibiotic. This can lead to an erroneous antibiotic choice and a resulting treatment failure. Droplet microfluidics offers unique advantages like lower fluid and associated costs, reagent consumption, and higher throughput. Hence droplet-based microfluidics can offer a faster, more efficient, and low-cost method with the ability to detect even single bacteria for antibiotic resistance compared to the agar plate-based methods.