Simple and low-cost antibiotic susceptibility testing for Mycobacterium tuberculosis using screen-printed electrodes

One quarter of the global population is thought to be latently infected by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) with it estimated that 1 in 10 of those people will go on to develop active disease. Due to the fact that M. tuberculosis (TB) is a disease most often associated with low- and middle-income countries, it is critical that low-cost and easy-to-use technological solutions are developed, which can have a direct impact on diagnosis and prescribing practice for TB. One area where intervention could be particularly useful is antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST). This work presents a low-cost, simple-to-use AST sensor that can detect drug susceptibility on the basis of changing RNA abundance for the typically slow-growing M. tuberculosis (TB) pathogen in 96 h using screen-printed electrodes and standard molecular biology laboratory reactionware. In order to find out the sensitivity of applied sensor platform, a different concentration (10(8)-10(3) CFU/mL) of M. tuberculosis was performed, and limit of detection and limit of quantitation were calculated as 10(3.82) and 10(11.59) CFU/mL, respectively. The results display that it was possible to detect TB sequences and distinguish antibiotic-treated cells from untreated cells with a label-free molecular detection. These findings pave the way for the development of a comprehensive, low-cost, and simple-to-use AST system for prescribing in TB and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.

Automated summary

It is estimated that one quarter of the global population is latently infected by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB), with 1 in 10 going on to develop active disease. Low-cost and easy-to-use technological solutions are critical for diagnosis and prescribing practice for TB in low- and middle-income countries. This study presents a low-cost and simple-to-use AST sensor that can detect drug susceptibility of M. tuberculosis in 96 hours.