Burn infections, which are frequently reported because of cutaneous thermal injuries, continue to be an important cause of morbidity and mortality1. The management of burn infections has been further compromised by the increasing emergence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacterial strains2 due to the massive use of antibiotics. One important MDR Gram-negative bacteria is Acinetobacter baumannii, which is known to be associated with recent battle wounds and is resistant to almost all available antibiotics3. The presence of biofilms at the injured foci has been reported4,5 and is believed to exacerbate the tolerance to antibiotics and host defense6,7, causing persistent infections8,9. Therefore, there is a pressing need for the development of alternative treatments. In the recently announced National Strategy for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria, the development of alternative therapeutics to antibiotics has been noted as an action by the government of the United States10.
Light-based antimicrobial approaches, as indicated by the name, require light irradiation with or without other agents. These approaches include antimicrobial photodynamic therapy (aPDT), ultraviolet-C (UVC) irradiation, and antimicrobial blue light (aBL). In previous studies, they have shown promising effectiveness in killing MDR bacterial strains11,12,13. Among the three light-based approaches, aBL has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its intrinsic antibacterial properties without the use of photosensitizers14. In comparison to aPDT, aBL only involves the use of light, while aPDT requires a combination of light and a photosensitizer. Therefore, aBL is simple and inexpensive14. In comparison to UVC, aBL is believed to be much less cytotoxic and genotoxic to host cells15.
The goal of this protocol is to investigate the effectiveness of aBL for the treatment of burn infections caused by MDR A. baumannii in a mouse model. We use bioluminescent pathogenic bacteria to develop new mouse models of burn infections that allow the non-invasive monitoring of the bacterial burden in real time. Compared to the traditional method of body fluid/tissue sampling and subsequent plating and colony counting16, this technique provides accurate results. The process of tissue sampling could introduce another source of experimental error. Since the bacterial luminescence intensity is linearly proportional to the corresponding bacterial CFU17, we can directly measure the survival of bacteria after a certain dose of light irradiation. By monitoring the bacterial burden in living animals receiving the light treatment in real time, the kinetics of bacterial killing can be characterized using a significantly reduced number of mice.