Nanosensors supported studies of bacterial evolution

为了以自动化的方式研究细菌中抗生素耐药性的发生，该项目旨在通过将基于液滴的微流体技术与基于离子传感器的离子传感器相结合来设计、测试和应用芯片设备。虽然基于液滴的微流体允许对细菌分离株的进化进行最大程度的并行测量（在任何给定时间多达104个实验），但基于硅藻土的离子敏感检测通过记录pH和碳源消耗变化的独特时间推移曲线，能够探测细菌的代谢活性和生存力。后者的信息，目前的方法无法访问，带来了一个新的维度到微生物分析领域，因为没有光学可检测的生长并不一定意味着细胞是死的和/或不消耗/产生特定的化学品。最重要的是，对数千个液滴的多步骤和高度平行的处理（孵育、分选、用新鲜营养物重新喂养），包括对下一轮抗生素浓度具有增强抗性的物种的自动转移，将能够以高复制率和早期检测突变群体来关闭完整的“进化周期”。随着这一发展，我们回答的问题，电子微型生物传感器系统是否可以作为一个有效的工具，观察细菌的进化过程。

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.