MBT-ASTRA: A suitable tool for fast antibiotic susceptibility testing?

Workflow of the MBT-ASTRA approach. [Display omitted] •Short, species dependent incubation time in the range between 1 and 4h.•Species dependent breakpoint concentrations provide resistance information.•Titration set ups provide susceptibility information (“ASTRA MIC”).•MBT-ASTRA results in concordance to routine methods.•Etest MIC and “ASTRA MIC” show a direct correlation. The increasing resistance to antibiotics is an urgent health care problem. Detection of resistant microorganisms is the pre-requisite for initiating an adequate therapy and implementing respective hygiene measures. Depending on the species and the method employed for analysis, the time to result of antibiotic resistance testing ranges between five and 24h. As MALDI-TOF MS has become an established tool for the fast species identification in microbiological laboratories a time gap between the results of species identification and the information about antibiotic susceptibility arises. Here, we present a semi-quantitative MALDI-TOF MS-based approach for the detection of resistance in different species against different antibiotics.