Fighting TB with light and sound
Fighting TB with light and sound
A UK-wide research team, led by the Schools of Physics and Astronomy and Medicine at University of St Andrews, have developed an innovative way to monitor the reaction of living bacteria to antibiotics using lasers and sound.
This new approach could lead to a more detailed understanding of antimicrobial resistance and shortening the treatment for the world’s leading infectious disease, Tuberculosis (TB) which causes about a million deaths every year.
The study, in collaboration with the University of Southampton, published 14 May 2020 in Communications Biology (Nature), opens the door to studying the response of any microorganism to various antivirals and antibiotics.
“Real-time monitoring of live mycobacteria with a microfluidic acoustic-Raman platform” – Vincent O. Baron, Mingzhou Chen, Björn Hammarstrom, Robert J. H. Hammond, Peter Glynne-Jones, Stephen H. Gillespie and Kishan Dholakia, Communications Biology 3, 236 (2020)
The work was supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the PreDiCT-TB consortium and the PanACEA consortium.