Open-source super-resolved bacterial cytological profiling for high throughput bacterial phenotyping and detection of antimicrobial mode of action

Bacterial cells are tiny but highly spatially organized. Light microscopes are essential to understanding how bacteria grow and divide, and in helping to develop new antibiotic drugs to combat the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance. Fluorescence microscopy is a powerful tool in identifying antimicrobial activities as most antimicrobial action translates to microscopically detectable phenotypes. Systematic high throughput imaging of cells treated with chemical compounds can therefore be used to identify promising compounds against various diseases - known as phenotypic drug discovery. This project will focus on developing advanced image analysis methods to identify antimicrobial mode of action. This will result in a pipeline for rapid phenotyping of treated cells to increase speed at which novel antimicrobial compounds can be detected in early-stage drug discovery screens, as well as provide insight into their mechanism of action.