Determination of Bacterial Sensitivity to a Bacteriophage by Using a Compact Acoustic Analyzer

Abstract

The discovery of bacteriophages allowed the development of new ways to control the bacterial number and to assess bacterial viability. The most obvious application of bacteriophages is the treatment of human bacterial infections (phage therapy). The advantage of phage therapy is the extreme specificity of phages, since they interact with and infect only certain bacteria without affecting other bacteria or cell lines of other organisms. The advances in phage biology led to the widespread use of specific phage–host interactions in medicine and the agricultural and food industries. Thus, bacteriophages are an alternative to antibiotics for fighting infections and destroying pathogenic bacteria. This work has demonstrated for the first time the potential of a compact acoustic sensor system for assessing the impact of bacteriophages on microbial cells and the bacteriophage sensitivity of the latter. It has been shown that the developed system can be used to evaluate the activity of bacteriophages against microbial cells within 5 min without taking into account the time of cultivation of microbial cells for analysis. The results obtained are promising for further development of the acoustic sensory system in phage therapy.