Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 103, Issue 13, Pages 4841-4845Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0601211103
Keywords
bacteriophage T7; BirA; Escherichia coli; water sample
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Funding
- Intramural NIH HHS Funding Source: Medline
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With current concerns of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and biodefense, it has become important to rapidly identify infectious bacteria. Traditional technologies involving isolation and amplification of the pathogenic bacteria are time-consuming. We report a rapid and simple method that combines in vivo biotinylation of engineered host-specific bacteriophage and conjugation of the phage to streptavidin-coated quantum dots. The method provides specific detection of as few as 10 bacterial cells per milliliter in experimental samples, with an approximate to 100-fold amplification of the signal over background in 1 In. We believe that the method can be applied to any bacteria susceptible to specific phages and would be particularly useful for detection of bacterial strains that are slow growing, e.g., Mycobacterium, or are highly infectious, e.g., Bacillus anthracis. The potential for simultaneous detection of different bacterial species in a single sample and applications in the study of phage biology are discussed.
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