Student St. Andrews's School(DE) Middletown, Delaware, United States
Introduction: The Bacterial resistance caused by antibiotic abuse has become a global focus, and the current identification methods, which mainly use the paper strip method and microdilution culture method, take too much time to obtain results. A new method incorporating digital microfluidics can quickly determine bacterial responses to various antibiotics through the technology’s precise absolute quantitative capabilities.
Materials and
Methods: A microfluidic chip is developed to quickly distribute urine sample droplets to different antibiotic sections by heating the chip blocks. Since sensitive bacteria do not build color under the action of antibiotics and resistant bacteria develop color if not inhibited, it can be determined whether the pathogen in the sample is resistant to the tested drug according to the inhibition rate.
Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: As the bacteria samples were colored with fluorescence, the fluorescence intensity in the droplet would fluctuate according to the bacteria's tolerance to different antibiotics. If the bacteria is tolerant to the selected antibiotic, the fluorescence intensity will remain strong even after the mixture. However, if the antibiotic is successful at repressing the bacteria, the fluorescence intensity will drop significantly after the mixture.
