Publication: Development of an Inverted Epifluorescence Microscope for Long-Term Monitoring of Bacteria in Multiplexed Microfluidic Devices
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Publication date
2020-08-01
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Tutors
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MDPI
Abstract
Developing more efficient methods for antibiotic susceptibility testing is a pressing issue
in novel drug development as bacterial resistance to antibiotics becomes increasingly common.
Microfluidic devices have been demonstrated to be powerful platforms that allow researchers to
perform multiplexed antibiotic testing. However, the level of multiplexing within microdevices
is limited, evidencing the need of creating simple, low-cost and high-resolution imaging systems
that can be integrated in antibiotic development pipelines. This paper describes the design and
development of an epifluorescence inverted microscope that enables long-term monitoring of bacteria
inside multiplexed microfluidic devices. The goal of this work is to provide a simple microscope
powerful enough to allow single-cell analysis of bacteria at a reduced cost. This facilitates increasing
the number of microscopes that are simultaneously used for antibiotic testing. We prove that the
designed system is able to accurately detect fluorescent beads of 100 nm, demonstrating comparable
features to high-end commercial microscopes and effectively achieving the resolution required for
single-cell analysis of bacteria. The proposed microscope could thus increase the efficiency in antibiotic
testing while reducing cost, size, weight, and power requirements, contributing to the successful
development of new antibiotic drugs.
Description
Keywords
Epifluorescence microscopy, Time-lapse microscopy, Fluorescence imaging, Single-cell analysis, Microfluidics, GFP-expressing bacteria, Drug development, Antibiotic resistance
Bibliographic citation
Torres-Simón, A., Marino, M. H., Gómez-Cruz, C., Cañadas, M., Marco, M., Ripoll, J., Vaquero, J. J., Muñoz-Barrutia, A. (2020). Development of an Inverted Epifluorescence Microscope for Long-Term Monitoring of Bacteria in Multiplexed Microfluidic Devices. Sensors, 20(15), 4140