title: Evaluating the toxic effect of an antimicrobial agent on single bacterial cells with optical tweezers.
abstract: We implement an optical tweezers technique to assess the effects of chemical agents on single bacterial cells. As a proof of principle, the viability of a trapped Escherichia coli bacterium is determined by monitoring its flagellar motility in the presence of varying concentrations of ethyl alcohol. We show that the "killing time" of the bacterium can be effectively identified from the correlation statistics of the positional time series recorded from the trap, while direct quantification from the time series or associated power spectra is intractable. Our results, which minimize the lethal effects of bacterial photodamage, are consistent with previous reports of ethanol toxicity that used conventional culture-based methods. This approach can be adapted to study other pairwise combinations of drugs and motile bacteria, especially to measure the response times of single cells with better precision.
authors: Department of Physics and Astronomy, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA.
authors: Akbar
authors: A
authors: Samadi
authors: Department of Physics and Astronomy, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA.
authors: Chensong
authors: C
authors: Zhang
authors: Department of Biology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA.
authors: Joseph
authors: J
authors: Chen
authors: Department of Physics, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran 11365-9161, Iran.
authors: S N S
authors: SN
authors: Reihani
authors: Department of Physics and Astronomy, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA ; TEDA Applied Physics Institute and School of Physics, Nankai University, Tianjin 300457, China.
authors: Zhigang
authors: Z
authors: Chen
keywords: (170.3650) Lifetime-based sensing; (170.4520) Optical confinement and manipulation; (350.4855) Optical tweezers or optical manipulation
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