@article {Baltekin071407, author = {{\"O}zden Baltekin and Alexis Boucharin and Dan I. Andersson and Johan Elf}, title = {Fast Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing (FASTest) based on single cell growth rate measurements}, elocation-id = {071407}, year = {2016}, doi = {10.1101/071407}, publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory}, abstract = {The emergence and spread of multidrug resistant bacteria is a global threat to human health. The problem is aggravated as a result of unnecessary and incorrect use of broad-spectrum antibiotics. One way to assure correct antibiotic use and reduce the development of antibiotic resistance is to assay the susceptibility profile of the infection before treatment is initiated. However, the current methods for Antibiotics Susceptibility Testing (AST) are too slow to be used for routine screening. Here we present a fast AST test, FASTest, that captures bacterial cells in individual nanofluidics channels and monitor their response to different antibiotics based on direct imaging. By averaging the growth rate over a few hundred cells we can determine the susceptibility to several antibiotics in less than 30 min even at cell densities as low as 104 CFU/mL of sample. This is a time scale and concentration that makes the FASTest practically useful for guiding the primary antibiotic treatment of several types of infections.Significance Antibiotic resistance is a major problem for human health. The growth of this problem can be restricted by more specific use of antibiotics. This does however require that it is possible to test to which antibiotics the bacteria are susceptible before starting treatment of an infection. Here we show that it is possible to make an antibiotic susceptibility test faster than 30 min starting with only a thousand bacterial cells in less than 1 mL of liquid. The Fast Antibiotic Susceptibility Test, FASTest, is based on a microfluidic capturing technique and single cell growth rate measurements. FASTest is directly applicable to urinary tract infections but can be extended to other infections, for example sepsis.}, URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/08/26/071407}, eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/08/26/071407.full.pdf}, journal = {bioRxiv} }