Abstract
The development of strategies to reduce the load of unwanted bacteria is a fundamental challenge in industrial processing, environmental sciences and medical applications. Here, we report a new method to sequester motile bacteria from a liquid, based on passive, deployable micro-traps that confine bacteria using micro-funnels that open into trapping chambers. Even in low concentrations, micro-traps afford a 70% reduction in the amount of bacteria in a liquid sample, with a potential to reach >90% as shown by modelling improved geometries. This work introduces a new approach to contain the growth of bacteria without chemical means, an advantage of particular importance given the alarming growth of pan-drug-resistant bacteria.
Highlights
We conducted experiments with two species of motile bacteria: the peritrichous enteric bacterium Escherichia coli, which represents the classic model for bacterial motility, and the marine pathogen Vibrio coralliilyticus, which possesses a single polar flagellum and swims rapidly with a strategy that significantly differs from E. coli’s
In all micro-traps, we detected an accumulation of bacteria, for both E. coli and V. coralliilyticus (Fig. 2c), demonstrating the ability of the micro-traps to trap swimming bacteria
Our results demonstrate the potential of deployable micro-traps, which can be fabricated in high-throughput and can considerably reduce the load of bacteria from a liquid suspension within tens of minutes
Summary
We first tested surface-attached micro-traps by imaging (Fig. 2a) the accumulation of bacteria within the traps over time, for four different geometries (single domes, 1-layer boxes, 2-layer boxes and 3-layer boxes; Fig. 2b), all with funnel-shaped apertures. The highest average accumulation (4-fold higher concentration of bacteria within the micro-traps than outside) was observed in the 3-layer micro-traps.
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