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

Abstract

AbstractOne 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 (108–103 CFU/mL) of M. tuberculosis was performed, and limit of detection and limit of quantitation were calculated as 103.82 and 1011.59 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.