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 Mycobacterium 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). In this work presents a low cost, simple to use AST sensor which can detect drug susceptibility on the basis of changing RNA abundance for the typically slow growing Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) pathogen in 96 hours using screen-printed electrodes and standard molecular biology laboratory reactionware. In order to find out sensitivity of applied sensor platform, different concentration (10 8 -10 3 CFU/mL) of M. tuberculosis was performed and Limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantitation (LOQ) was 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 development of a comprehensive, low cost and simple to use AST system for prescribing in TB and mdrTB. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.