SEE-phAST: Spatially encapsulated emulsions for phenotypic antibiotic susceptibility testing via sequential digital...

The escalating threat of antimicrobial resistance is exacerbated by delayed diagnostics and improper antibiotics use, underscoring an urgent demand for rapid, versatile AST tools to support evidence-based prescribing. In this study, we present an innovative, generalizable phenotypic AST approach by quantifying bacterial gDNA copy number variations (CNVs) following 0.5-h-brief culturing with antibiotic exposure, termed spatially encapsulated emulsions (SEE)-phAST. It employed gelatin-PEG biomimetic phase separation and microfluidic technology to one-step fabricate spatial-confined microcarriers that enabled on-demand separation and mixing of recombinase-aided amplification (RAA) and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated protein 12a (CRISPR/Cas12a) reactions in a sequentially orchestrated manner. Importantly, it retained the superiority of droplet-based digitalization framework to identify 3-4 folds CNVs while synergistically enhancing signal-to-noise ratio and detection speed through RAA pre-amplification. By utilizing a phase diagram for precise separation, coupled with channel design and rate regulation, we controllably synthesized 180-210 μm microcarriers with 90-100 μm cores, achieving a 30-min RAA amplification that boosted sensitivity from 10¹¹ to 10¹ aM. The artificial urinary infection samples were prepared by introducing common bacteria, specifically Klebsiella pneumoniae, Escherichia coli, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, into urinary samples obtained from healthy individuals. We demonstrated the system's capability to classify susceptibility and resistance to three specific drugs following a 30-min pre-culture, with epigenetic changes quantified as reduced to 0.5 for inhibition and maintained at 2 for unaffected growth. This strategy presents valuable potential for AST diagnosis and versatility in other sequence recognition scenarios.