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Updated: Jan 28, 2026

Design and Use of a Low Cost, Automated Morbidostat for Adaptive Evolution of Bacteria Under Antibiotic Drug Selection
Published on: September 27, 2016
A multiplexable assay for screening antibiotic lethality against drug-tolerant bacteria
Jonathan M Stokes1,2, Arnaud Gutierrez1,2,3, Allison J Lopatkin1,2,4
1Institute for Medical Engineering & Science, Department of Biological Engineering, and Synthetic Biology Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Abstract:
Antibiotic screens typically rely on growth inhibition to characterize compound bioactivity-an approach that cannot be used to assess the bactericidal activity of antibiotics against bacteria in drug-tolerant states. To address this limitation, we developed a multiplexed assay that uses metabolism-sensitive staining to report on the killing of antibiotic-tolerant bacteria. This method can be used with diverse bacterial species and applied to genome-scale investigations to identify therapeutic targets against tolerant pathogens.
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