Antibiotic discovery: combining isolation chip (iChip) technology and co-culture technique

Antibiotics had been a useful tool for treating bacterial infections since their discovery, but with the passage of time, the evolution of resistance among microbes against antibiotics has rendered them useless. Many approaches are being used to tackle this problem which include discovery of new antibiotics, modification of the existing ones, and elucidating mechanisms of resistance in microbes for a better understanding. In this review, we have discussed that discovery of new antibiotics is a basic need to fight emerging infectious bacteria, and for this purpose, we should target those microbes from the environment which are not easily culturable. For this purpose, culturing technique should be modified to the in situ culturing as nutritional requirements of unculturable bacteria are unknown. Two different cultivation strategies, diffusion chambers and iChip technology, have been reviewed for their excellent improvement in culturing compared to conventional techniques. Since co-culture is also an important factor which can result in exploring new microbial diversity, we hypothesize that if iChip and co-culture can be combined in a single device, it can allow production of novel antibiotics from those bacteria which are difficult to be cultured in the future.