MAESTRO 10 NCN
Microfluidic methods for quantitative antibiotic susceptibility assays with single cell resolution (2018/30/A/ST4/00036)
Funding: National Science Centre, Poland
Grant period: 01.10.2019-30.09.2025
Project description:
Antibiotic resistant infections continue to be one of the grimmest threats to human health. The problem can only be effectively solved by better understanding of the response of bacteria to antibiotics. It will help to avoid emergence of resistance and to guide effective treatment.
That is why the objective of our project is to develop a new set of analytical tools that will allow to characterize the complexity of how bacteria respond to antibiotics used in clinical practice. To this end we use droplet microfluidics – a set of techniques that enable generation of thousands or millions of tiny, identical droplets. These droplets may be formed of a suspension of bacteria, resulting in encapsulation of single (individual) bacterial cells, or multiple cells in the droplets. By adding antibiotics at a range of concentrations, we are able to prepare sets (libraries) of droplets, each library containing droplets with a well-defined concentration of the antibiotic and number of bacterial cells.
