Development of a sandwiched microarray platform for studying the interactions of antibiotics with Staphylococcus aureus

• Fabricate a hydrogel microarray on EDC/NHS activated hydrogel spots.
• Studying the specific binding affinities of bacteria and lectins.
• Develop a sandwiched hydrogel microarray platform for high-throughput drug screening.
• The MIC values of antibiotics against S. aureus can be obtained.

It still confronts an outstanding challenge to screen efficient antibacterial drugs from millions of potential antibiotic candidates. In this regard, a sandwiched microarray platform has been developed to culture live bacteria and carry out high-throughput screening antibacterial drugs. The optimized lectin-hydrogel microarray can be used as an efficient bacterial capturing and culturing platform, which is beneficial to identify spots and collect data. At the same time, a matching drug-laden polyacrylamide microarray with Luria–Bertani (LB) culture medium can be generated automatically and accurately by using a standard non-contacting procedure. A large number of microscale culture chambers (more than 100 individual samples) between two microarrays can be formed by linking two aligned hydrogel spots using LB culture medium, where live bacteria can be co-cultured with drug candidates. Using Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and four well-known antibiotics (amoxicillin, vancomycin, streptomycin and chloramphenicol) as model system, the MIC (minimum inhibitory concentration) values of the antibiotics can be determined by the drug induced change of bacterial growth, and the results demonstrate that the MIC values of amoxicillin, vancomycin and streptomycin are 1.7 μg mL−1, 3.3 μg mL−1 and 10.3 μg mL−1, respectively.

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