Revealing antibiotic tolerance of the mycobacterium smegmatis xanthine/uracil permease mutant using microfluidics and single-cell analysis

Elitaş, Meltem and Dhar, Neeraj and McKinney, John D. (2021) Revealing antibiotic tolerance of the mycobacterium smegmatis xanthine/uracil permease mutant using microfluidics and single-cell analysis. Antibiotics, 10 (7). ISSN 2079-6382

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Abstract

To reveal rare phenotypes in bacterial populations, conventional microbiology tools should be advanced to generate rapid, quantitative, accurate, and high-throughput data. The main draw-backs of widely used traditional methods for antibiotic studies include low sampling rate and aver-aging data for population measurements. To overcome these limitations, microfluidic-microscopy systems have great promise to produce quantitative single-cell data with high sampling rates. Using Mycobacterium smegmatis cells, we applied both conventional assays and a microfluidic-microscopy method to reveal the antibiotic tolerance mechanisms of wild-type and msm2570::Tn mutant cells. Our results revealed that the enhanced antibiotic tolerance mechanism of the msm2570::Tn mutant was due to the low number of lysed cells during the antibiotic exposure compared to wild-type cells. This is the first study to characterize the antibiotic tolerance phenotype of the msm2570::Tn mutant, which has a transposon insertion in the msm2570 gene—encoding a putative xanthine/uracil permease, which functions in the uptake of nitrogen compounds during nitrogen limitation. The experimental results indicate that the msm2570::Tn mutant can be further interrogated to reveal antibiotic killing mechanisms, in particular, antibiotics that target cell wall integrity. © 2021 by the authors.
Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Antibiotics; Conventional; Microbiology; Microfluidics; Microscopy; Mycobacterium smegmatis; Population; Single cell
Divisions: Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences > Academic programs > Mechatronics
Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences
Depositing User: Meltem Elitaş
Date Deposited: 19 Jul 2022 09:48
Last Modified: 30 Aug 2022 15:55
URI: https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/id/eprint/43049

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