Recent Developments of Chip-based Phenotypic Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing

Abstract

Antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST), the screening of effective types and dosages of antibiotics, has become significantly important in the antimicrobial- resistance era over the last few decades. In order to overcome the limitations of conventional AST methods, several recent studies have developed AST platforms which exhibit the advantages of microfluidics. They demonstrated the performance of the platforms by determining effective antimicrobials for bacterial strains and their minimum inhibitory concentrations within hours. In this review, we cover recent developments of on-chip approaches for measurements of bacterial growth as well as for dilutions of antibiotic concentrations. We also discuss Point-of-Care AST devices that employ inexpensive materials and simple working principles to operate screenings near the site of care, which can potentially bring current laboratory- limited assays to clinical standards. All thing considered, emerging microfluidic AST devices have the potential to be decent alternatives to commonplace macro-scale AST methods.