Asynchronous magnetic bead rotation (AMBR) micro-viscometer for rapid, sensitive and label-free studies of bacterial growth and drug sensitivity

The long turnaround time in antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) endangers patients and encourages the administration of wide spectrum antibiotics, thus resulting in alarming increases of multi-drug resistant pathogens. A method for faster detection of bacterial proliferation presents one avenue towards addressing this global concern. We report on a label-free asynchronous magnetic bead rotation (AMBR) based viscometry method that rapidly detects bacterial growth and determines drug sensitivity by measuring changes in the suspension’s viscosity. With this platform, we observed the growth of a uropathogenic Escherichia coli isolate, with an initial concentration of 50 cells per drop, within 20 minutes; in addition, we determined the gentamicin minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of the E. coli isolate within 100 minutes. We thus demonstrated a label-free, micro-viscometer platform that can measure bacterial growth and drug susceptibility more rapidly, with lower initial bacterial counts than existing commercial systems, and potentially with any microbial strains.