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Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a growing global threat to the effective treatment of infectious disease1. It is predicted that AMR will cause an additional 10 million deaths per year and $100 trillion global GDP loss by 2050 if no action for combating antibiotic-resistant bacteria is taken1,2. This stresses the urgent need for rapid and innovative diagnostic methods for antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) of infectious bacteria to slow down the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and reduce the related mortality rate3. To ensure the best possible clinical outcome, it is crucial to introduce effective therapy within 24 h. However, the current gold standard method, like disk diffusion or broth dilution method, usually requires at least 24 h for the preincubation procedure for clinical samples and an additional 16-24 h to obtain the minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) results. Overall, these methods are too time-consuming to guide an immediate decision for infectious disease treatment in the clinic, which leads to the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance4.
Genotypic AST methods, such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based techniques5, have been developed for rapid detection. Such techniques measure the specific resistance genetic sequences in order to provide rapid AST results. They do not rely on time-consuming cell culture; however, only specific known genetic sequences with resistance are tested. Therefore, its application is limited to various bacterial species or different mechanisms of resistance. Also, they cannot provide MIC results for therapy decisions6,7. Besides, novel phenotypic methods for rapid AST are under development to overcome these limitations8, including microfluidic devices9,10,11,12,13, optical devices14,15,16, phenotypic AST quantifying the nucleic acids copy number17,18, and Raman spectroscopic methods19,20,21,22,23,24. These methods reduce time to guide AST results, however, most of them are only applicable to bacterial isolates, not directly to clinical specimens, and still require long-time preincubation.
In this work, we present a method for rapid determination of the susceptibility of bacteria in the urine and whole blood via monitoring of the cellular metabolic activity by SRS imaging. Water (H2O) takes part in the vast majority of essential biomolecular synthesis processes in living cells. As an isotopologue of water, through enzyme-catalyzed H/D exchange reaction between the redox-active hydrogen atom in NADPH and the D atom in D2O, deuterium can be incorporated into biomass inside a cell25,26. A deuterated fatty acid synthesis reaction is mediated by the deuterium labeled NADPH. The D2O incorporation into reactions of amino acids (AAs) results in the deuterated protein production26 (Figure 1). In this way, the newly synthesized C-D bond-containing biomolecules in single microbial cells can be employed as a general metabolic activity marker to be detected. To read out de novo synthesized C-D bonds, Raman spectroscopy, a versatile analytical tool providing specific and quantitative chemical information of biomolecules, is widely used to determine antimicrobial susceptibility and significantly reduce the testing time to a few hours27,28,29,30. However, due to the inherent low efficiency of the Raman scattering process, the spontaneous Raman spectroscopy is of low detection sensitivity. Therefore, it is challenging to obtain real-time image results using spontaneous Raman spectroscopy. Coherent Raman scattering (CRS), including coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), has reached high detection sensitivity because of the coherent light field to generate orders of magnitude larger than that of spontaneous Raman spectroscopy, thereby rendering high-speed, specific, and quantitative chemical imaging at the single cell level31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39.
Here, based on our most recent work40, we present a protocol for rapid determination of the metabolic activity and antimicrobial susceptibility by femtosecond SRS C-D imaging of D2O incorporation of bacteria in the normal medium, urine, and whole blood environment at the single-cell level. Femtosecond SRS imaging facilitates monitoring single cell metabolism inactivation concentration (SC-MIC) against antibiotics at the single bacterium level within 2.5 h. The SC-MIC results are validated by standard MIC test via broth microdilution. Our method is applicable for determining antimicrobial susceptibility of bacteria urinary tract infection (UTI) and bloodstream infection (BSI) pathogens with a much reduced assay time compared to the conventional method, which opens the opportunity for rapid phenotypic AST in the clinic at the single-cell level.