Infection Inspection

When we test a sample taken from a patient to see which antibiotics will work (and which will not) we test many thousands of bacteria all at once; if the antibiotic kills most of them we say it is susceptible. But in some cases that isn’t good enough: the few that are left (because they are resistant) can grow and multiply so all you’ve done is buy a little time.

What if instead you could look at the effects of an antibiotic on a single bacterium?

That, in essence, is what the interdisciplinary team drawn from both the Department of Physics and the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford did with this project. Using fluorescent staining and super-resolution microscopy they can image individual bacteria and ones which are resistant to an antibiotic “look different”, providing you’ve stained the right parts of the bug.

Humans, of course, are really good at looking at photographs and so they also set up a Citizen Science project on the Zooniverse called, you guessed it, Infection Inspection. They asked volunteers to classify of E. coli which had been fluorescently stained and then treated with an antibiotic as either resistant or susceptible.

If you want to read more about this please go and read their paper.