One of these efforts, developed by University of California San Diego researchers, involves performing postmortems on sampled bacterial cells to determine their strains and level of susceptibility. The method could reduce detection time to only a few hours.
“Regardless of the type of bacterium, a healthy and growing bacterium looks different from a dead bacterium, so whenever we detect a difference in how the cells look, we know that the bacterium is sensitive to the antibiotic we have applied,” Joe Pogliano, PhD, a UCSD professor of biology and co-author on the study, said in a statement. “When we combine careful culture conditions, cutting edge imaging methods and a detailed quantitative analysis, we can turn this simple approach into a reliable test.“
The results are published in EBioMedicine.
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