Experimental approach for bacteriophage susceptibility testing of planktonic and sessile bacterial populations – Study protocol

Abstract

Introduction Antimicrobial resistance is a growing threat for all clinical branches. This phenomenon poses important challenges in controlling infectious diseases. However, multidrug resistance is not the only issue, as bacteria that are otherwise susceptible to common antibiotics express other patterns for evading antibiotherapy, for example they can aggregate within a self-produced matrix to form biofilm.Methods We intend to perform a prospective laboratory study of the germs isolated from different samples collected from patients admitted with infectious pathology in reference hospitals in Romania. We will perform antibiotic resistance testing as well as phage testing, both on solid and liquid growth medium, for Staphylococcus spp., Enterococcus spp., and Pseudomonas spp. We intend to collect data for 150 patients with different infections with these identified pathogens.Phage susceptibility testing will be performed using 5 types of strain-specific bacteriophage mixtures: PYO, INTESTI, STAPHYLOCOCCAL (Eliava BioPreparations, Tbilisi, Georgia), PHAGYO, PHAGESTI (JSC "Biochimpharm", Tbilisi, Georgia). For phage-susceptible strains, we will evaluate biofilm formation in the presence of phages, as well as phage effect on already formed biofilm.Expected results Through this study, we intend to provide the first set of results on bacteriophagesusceptibility of bacteria isolated from patients with hard to treat infections, from reference hospitals in Romania. By evaluating a large number of bacterial strains we aim to predict and project biofilm kinetics, while adding binary phage dilutions at key timepoints during biofilm formation.

Multiscale Metal Oxide Particles to Enhance Photocatalytic Antimicrobial Activity against Escherichia coli and M13 Bacteriophage under Dual Ultraviolet Irradiation

“…For antimicrobial activity test, E. coli and phage have been extensively used as model microorganisms of bacteria and viruses [ 35 , 36 ]. E. coli is one of the most rapidly growing bacteria to easily quantify the colonies via UV-visible scanning for turbidity measurement and colony counting on agar plates [ 37 , 38 ].…”

Myoviridae phage PDX kills enteroaggregative Escherichia coli without human microbiome dysbiosis

“…Today, even the general public is learning of phage therapy due to the prevalence of multiple-drug-resistant (MDR) bacteria. Recently, phages have been used successfully for the treatment of bacterial pathogens, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus spp., in Poland and Romania, respectively [ 8–10 ]. However, few phage therapy clinical trials have been conducted in Western countries.…”

Rapid label-free identification of pathogenic bacteria species from a minute quantity exploiting three-dimensional quantitative phase imaging and artificial neural network

“…Our proposed method has important advantages compared to other methods for identifying bacterial species. 20 , antiserum test 16 , DNA microarray 19,21 , and real-time PCR 17 can be utilized to identify bacterial species. However, these invasive methods also involve hour-long to day-long processes and necessiate the management of specialized biochemical agents, on account of the heavy reliance on biochemical reactions or molecule-specific signals.…”

“…The risks accompanying inappropriate antibiotic treatments further highlight the demand for identification of the pathogens [12][13][14][15] . Accordingly, multiple methods have been proposed to rapidly identify the microbial pathogens in bloodstream [16][17][18][19][20][21] .…”