Development of an optical-based rapid antimicrobial susceptibility test for clinical applications.

The PhD project is part of an interdisciplinary effort to develop a rapid antimicrobial susceptibility test to reduce the impact of antimicrobial resistance. Specifically, the project will study alternative ways of detecting intracellular fluctuations using an evanescent field illumination. It is known that these fluctuations are related to cellular metabolic activity, and they can be used to assess cellular viability immediately after exposure to an antimicrobial. The instrument recently developed in our laboratory has detected for the first time these intracellular fluctuations without the need for fluorescence tagging, but the setup is not suitable for a clinical setting, and a more compact and user-friendly alternative is needed. The project will require becoming familiar with standard biophysical methods for cellular characterisation. It will include training in confocal microscopy and atomic force microscopy of living bacterial cell, as well as the development of new chemical functionalisation protocols and micropatterning deposition to simplify the cell capturing step. The use of optical simulation software like Lumerical will support the development and testing of alternative implementations of the method. The final aim of the project is to develop a working prototype of a device that can rapidly assess the susceptibility of a bacterial sample to an antimicrobial. In the process, the project should stimulate the creation of new detection methods of the optical interaction between bacterial cells and evanescent fields. These new methods could have repercussions far beyond antimicrobial susceptibility and find more general uses in cell biology and cancer research. The project falls within the EPSRC Healthcare technologies theme.