Nanosensors supported studies of bacterial evolution

• Applicant: Dr. Larysa Baraban
• Subject Area: Microsystems
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 514682472

To study the occurrence of antibiotic resistance in bacteria in an automated fashion, this project aims to design, test and apply an chip device by combining droplet-based microfluidics with nanowire-based ion-sensorics. While droplet-based microfluidics allows for maximally parallelized measurements on the evolution of bacterial isolates (up to 104 experiments at any given time), nanowire-based ion-sensitive detection enables probing the metabolic activity and viability of bacteria, by recording unique time-lapse profiles of changes in pH and carbon source consumption. The latter information, not accessed by current methods, brings a new dimension into the field of microbiological analysis, because the absence of optically-detectable growth does not necessarily mean the cells are dead and/or do not consume/produce specific chemicals. Most importantly, the multistep and highly-parallel treatment of thousands of droplets (incubation, sorting, refeeding with fresh nutrients) including the automated transfer of species with increased resistance to the next round of antibiotic concentrations, will enable to close the full “evolution cycle” at high replication rates and early detection of mutant populations. With this development, we answer the question, whether the electronic miniaturized biosensor system could act as a valid tool for the observation of the evolutional processes in bacteria.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants