progression of biofilm formation and how it impacts antibiotic resistance 42. This concept could be extended to test various antimicrobial coatings and their properties.

Easy-to-use gravity-driven step emulsification devices are capable of digital enumeration of bacteria and antibiotic susceptibility testing within 5 hours.

The Beenakker-Mazur method of calculation of transport coefficients for suspensions has been analyzed. The analysis relies on calculation of the hydrodynamic function and the effective viscosity with higher accuracy and comparison of these characteristics to the original Beennakker-Mazur results. Comparison to numerical simulations is also given. Our calculations go along with the idea of Beenakker and Mazur, but avoid unnecessary approximations. Our higher accuracy results differ significantly from results obtained initially by Beenakker and Mazur for volume fractions φ > 25%. Moreover, our results agree with the precise numerical simulations of Abade and Ladd for volume fractions φ < 15% and volume fractions φ ≈ 45%, whereas for volume fractions 15% < φ < 40%, we observe pronounced discrepancies.

No abstract

Droplet microfluidics disrupted analytical biology with the introduction of digital polymerase chain reaction and single-cell sequencing. The same technology may also bring important innovation in the analysis of bacteria, including antibiotic susceptibility testing at the single-cell level. Still, despite promising demonstrations, the lack of a highthroughput label-free method of detecting bacteria in nanoliter droplets prohibits analysis of the most interesting strains and widespread use of droplet technologies in analytical microbiology. We use a sensitive and fast measurement of scattered light from nanoliter droplets to demonstrate reliable detection of the proliferation of encapsulated bacteria. We verify the sensitivity of the method by simultaneous readout of fluorescent signals from bacteria expressing fluorescent proteins and demonstrate label-free readout on unlabeled Gram-negative and Gram-positive species. Our approach requires neither genetic modification of the cells nor the addition of chemical markers of metabolism. It is compatible with a wide range of bacterial species of clinical, research, and industrial interest, opening the microfluidic droplet technologies for adaptation in these fields.

Heteroresistance is a phenomenon where isogenic bacteria population exhibits a diverse antibiotic resistance pattern at sub-population or single cell level. The sub-populations with higher resistance can remain undetected with conventional diagnostics which makes them subsequently harder to treat. Such surviving phenotypically heterogeneous sub-populations are also a potential hotbed for novel mutations, thus increasing the resistance permanently in bacteria. Droplet microfluidics gives tools for high-throughput analysis of bacteria and their response to antibiotics at single cell level, which is difficult to obtain with traditional agar plate technologies. In here we show for the first time the precise digital quantification of drug resistance profile in isogenic population at single cell level. We also see that the inhibiting amount of drug per bacteria remains quite stable regardless of bacteria density. Interestingly, the bacteria clump together preferably near these sub-inhibitory conditions. The technology and findings we describe here provide novel quantitative insight into the heteroresistance which is a key step in understanding the pathways leading to drug resistance. This knowledge is crucial in the context of global drug resistance threat as it can help us to find tools to prevent further escalation of drug resistance.

Diffusion of a probe in complex liquids and length scale dependent viscosity.

There is a long-standing question as to whether and to what extent it is possible to describe nonequilibrium systems in stationary states in terms of global thermodynamic functions. The positive answers have been obtained only for isothermal systems or systems with small temperature differences. We formulate thermodynamics of the stationary states of the ideal gas subjected to heat flow in the form of the zeroth, first, and second law. Surprisingly, the formal structure of steady state thermodynamics is the same as in equilibrium thermodynamics. We rigorously show that U satisfies the following equation dU= T* dS* -pdV for a constant number of particles, irrespective of the shape of the container, boundary conditions, size of the system, or mode of heat transfer into the system. We calculate S* and T* explicitly. The theory selects stable nonequilibrium steady states in a multistable system of ideal gas subjected to volumetric heating. It reduces to equilibrium thermodynamics when heat flux goes to zero.