Identification and antimicrobial susceptibility test of Arcobacter in agri-foods using a microfluidic "lab-on-a-chip" device

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In the recent years, Arcobacter has been considered as an emerging food- and water-borne pathogen and potential zoonotic agent. An increasing frequency of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, including Arcobacter species, has been identified to transmit from food products to humans and cause severe threat to the public health. Rapid detection techniques are required to provide timely antimicrobial resistance surveillance data for agri-food systems so as to mitigate the antibiotic resistance crisis. For this NSERC Alliance International Catalyst project, we aim to develop a microfluidic device for the identification and antimicrobial susceptibility tests of Arcobacter species. An microarray of bacterial incubation chambers will be developed in a polymer-based microfluidic device where chromogenic medium and antibiotics will be loaded. The growth of Arcobacter will be visualized by the color change due to the chromogenic reactions. The specificity and sensitivity of this device for the identification of Arcobacter in artificially contamianted chicken meat and milk will be evaluated. Then, on-chip antimicrobial susceptibility of Arcobacter will be evaluated by the lowest concentration of antibiotics that can inhibit the bacterial growth with no color change observed. This device will have the potential to reduce the total analysis time as well as simplify food sample preparation and chip operation for the end users. We expect that the detection by this microfluidic device will be achieved by using up to 500 times less of the reagents than with the standard microbiological reference methods due to the miniaturized size of the lab-on-a-chip platform. This device has the potential for wide applications in Arcobacter-associated food safety management and diagnostics especially in the resource-limited regions in Canada and worldwide.