Nanoliter-Sized Microchamber/Microarray Microfluidic Platform for Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing

The rise of antimicrobial resistance is challenging for physicians in clinical practice to prescribe antibiotics that are effective against bacterial infections. Conventional antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) is labor-intensive and time-consuming (18-24 h). Newly emerging technologies such as microfluidics may enable more rapid AST assay time. In this study, we utilize a nanoliter-sized microchamber/microarray-based microfluidic (N-3M) platform to reduce the AST assay time and rapidly determine the minimum inhibitory concentrations of different antibiotics. Bacterial suspensions, with or without antibiotics, are loaded into small nanoliter-sized chambers, and the change in fluorescent intensity emitted from resazurin reduction, which correlated with bacterial growth, is measured. We demonstrate the reproducibility, functionality, and efficiency of our N-3M platform for numerous wild-type clinical bacterial isolates including Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Enterococcus faecalis. The time-to-result of our N-3M platform varies between ∼1-3 h, depending on growth rates of different bacterial species. We believe that our proposed N-3M platform is robust, is easy-to-implement, has a short time-to-result, and can be applicable for microbial AST in clinical applications.