Fluidic tools for high-throughput Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) experiments
The Cira Lab has developed a fluidic platform, termed “Surface Patterned Omniphobic Tiles” (SPOTs), with excellent liquid handling capabilities. SPOTs allow researchers to quickly, cheaply, and precisely meter and combine liquids in thousands of independent sub-microliter volumes. These attributes make the SPOTs platform a powerful tool for the large set of microbiology experiments that require parallel liquid manipulations (e.g. obtaining dose-response curves for a treatment or assessing the impact of different medias on phenotype and genotype). Initial work suggests that these capabilities should be enabling for TB research, but also that additional work is required to get the platform ready for experiments involving Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), including optimizing robustness for BSL-3 requirements and validating the platform for common assays with Mtb. In this work we propose to carry out several refinements of the platform targeted toward BSL-3 use and conduct two experiments – involving viability assays and molecular profiling – that demonstrate the platform’s versatility for TB research. After refining the platform, viability assays and molecular profiling validation experiments will be used to generate insights into organism biology in droplets and screen for new antibiotics. This work will establish the SPOTs platform as a useful tool for TB research, and the resulting preliminary data will contribute new fundamental knowledge on transmission and treatment.