ArticleScientific reports2020
Droplet-based digital antibiotic susceptibility screen reveals single-cell clonal heteroresistance in an isogenic bacterial population.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Transcriptional regulation drives heteroresistance inmSystems · 2026Article
- Bacterial heteroresistance mechanisms, dynamics, and emerging diagnostic approaches.Bioscience reports · 2026Review
- Multiplexed, rapid phenotypic antibiotic susceptibility testing based on angle-resolved light scattering imaging of microfluidic droplets.Journal of advanced research · 2026Article
- Droplet microfluidics with image texture quantification for detection of rare antibiotic-resistant subpopulations from bloodstream infections.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- PRISM: A unified platform for phage isolation and characterization from single-droplet microenvironments.Science advances · 2026Article
- Probing Antibiotic Inhibition in Small Bacterial Populations With Combinatorial Droplet Microfluidics.Small science · 2026Article
- Microfluidics to Meet Antibiotic Resistance: A Growing Research Frontier.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Article
- Ciprofloxacin pre-exposure influences individual cell MIC and heteroresistance of bacteria inside microfluidic droplets.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Droplet microfluidics-based detection of rare antibiotic-resistant subpopulations inScience advances · 2025Article
- Bacterial strain type and TEM-1 enzyme allele impact antibiotic susceptibility distribution in monoclonal populations: a single-cell droplet approach.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Habitat fragmentation enhances microbial collective defence.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Droplet microfluidics for single-cell studies: a frontier in ecological understanding of microbiomes.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2025Review
- Time-Resolved Killing of Individual Bacterial Cells by a Polycationic Antimicrobial Polymer.ACS biomaterials science & engineering · 2024Article
- Microfluidic technologies for advanced antimicrobial susceptibility testing.Biomicrofluidics · 2024Review
- A Label-Free Droplet Sorting Platform Integrating Dielectrophoretic Separation for Estimating Bacterial Antimicrobial Resistance.Biosensors · 2024Article
- Plasmid-mediated phenotypic noise leads to transient antibiotic resistance in bacteria.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Measuring single-cell susceptibility to antibiotics within monoclonal bacterial populations.PloS one · 2024Article
- Time-resolved cell-to-cell heterogeneity ofFrontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2024Article
- Sensing of Antibiotic-Bacteria Interactions.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Since antibiotic resistance is a major threat to global health, recent observations that the traditional test of minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) is not informative enough to guide effective antibiotic treatment are alarming. Bacterial heteroresistance, in which seemingly susceptible isogenic bacterial populations contain resistant sub-populations, underlies much of this challenge. To close this gap, here we developed a droplet-based digital MIC screen that constitutes a practical analytical platform for quantifying the single-cell distribution of phenotypic responses to antibiotics, as well as for measuring inoculum effect with high accuracy. We found that antibiotic efficacy is determined by the amount of antibiotic used per bacterial colony forming unit (CFU), not by the absolute antibiotic concentration, as shown by the treatment of beta-lactamase-carrying Escherichia coli with cefotaxime. We also noted that cells exhibited a pronounced clustering phenotype when exposed to near-inhibitory amounts of cefotaxime. Overall, our method facilitates research into the interplay between heteroresistance and antibiotic efficacy, as well as research into the origin and stimulation of heterogeneity by exposure to antibiotics. Due to the absolute bacteria quantification in this digital assay, our method provides a platform for developing reference MIC assays that are robust against inoculum-density variations.
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