Lack of quick, surefire ways to determine whether a patient infection is being caused by bacteria that won't be susceptible to antibiotics makes it difficult for clinicians to determine when prescribing an antibiotic is appropriate and whether it would have any impact on the infection. However, due to the growing visibility around antibiotic resistance, a growing body of research is attempting to offer up solutions.
One of these efforts, developed by University of California San Diego researchers, involves performing postmortems on sampled bacterial cells to determine their strains and level of susceptibility. The method could reduce detection time to only a few hours.
"Regardless of the type of bacterium, a healthy and growing bacterium looks different from a dead bacterium, so whenever we detect a difference in how the cells look, we know that the bacterium is sensitive to the antibiotic we have applied," Joe Pogliano, PhD, a UCSD professor of biology and co-author on the study, said in a statement. "When we combine careful culture conditions, cutting edge imaging methods and a detailed quantitative analysis, we can turn this simple approach into a reliable test."
The results are published in EBioMedicine.
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