Being able to quickly measuring the growth of large numbers of cells can help scientists track their cellular response to potential therapeutic compounds, environmental stress, and other mechanisms. At MIT, researchers have developed so-called suspended microchannel resonators (SMR) within a microfluidic device that can measure the size of passing cells at high rate.
Previously, the researchers were able to use the SMRs to measure cell weight with unprecedented accuracy, but they were able to only do one cell at a time. This was too slow for many practical applications, so the team embedded multiple SMRs into one device and created a queuing system that gives time for cells to grow and processes them in one at a time in parallel across multiple channels.
To demonstrate the device in practice, the team tested the device on bacterial cells exposed to antibiotics and antimicrobial peptides. The investigators showed that they can detect the change in bacterial growth within an hour of introducing them to the compounds, considerably faster than techniques that require culturing of bacteria. This points to the potential for this technology to help select antibiotics much faster and more accurately than is currently possible.
Study in Nature Biotechnology: High-throughput measurement of single-cell growth rates using serial microfluidic mass sensor arrays…
Via: MIT…
