Antibiotic Susceptibility Test with Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering in a Microfluidic System

Antibiotic susceptibility test (AST) is essential in clinical diagnosis of serious bacterial infection, such as sepsis, while it typically takes 2-5 days for sample culture, antibiotic treatment, and reading result. Detecting metabolites secreted from bacteria with surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) enables rapid determination of antibiotic susceptibility, reducing the AST time to 1-2 days. However, it still requires 1 day of culture time to obtain sufficient quantity of bacteria for sample washing, bacterial extraction, and antibiotic treatment. Additionally, the whole procedure, manually performed in open environment, often suffers from contamination and human error. To address the above problems, a microfluidic system integrating membrane filtration and the SERS-active substrate (MF-SERS) was developed to perform on-chip bacterial enrichment, metabolite collection, and in situ SERS measurements for antibiotic susceptibility test. Using Escherichia coli as the prototype bacterium, the lowest SERS detection limit of bacterial concentration of the MF-SERS system is 10³ CFU/mL, which is 4 orders of magnitude lower than that using centrifugation-purification procedure, significantly shortening the bacterial culture time. The bacteria and secreted metabolites are enclosed during bacterial trapping, metabolite filtration, and SERS detection, thus minimizing possible contamination and human errors. Finally, the successful demonstration of AST on E. coli with a concentration of 10³ CFU/mL is presented. Overall, the MF-SERS system with a miniature size and well-confined microenvironment allows the integration of multiple bacteria processes for bacterial enrichment, culture, and determination of AST.