“Capturing the variation in growth and stress of environmental bacterial subcommunities in response to chlorine using high-throughput fluorescent activated sorting of droplets.”
We are pleased to announce a live webinar on March 4th (Tue) featuring Dr. Ayo Ogundero, from the University of Glasgow. This webinar is highly recommended for researchers interested in droplet technology.
[Date]: March 4th (Tue), 2025
[Time]: 3PM (GMT) | 10AM (EST)
15:00 – 15:10 Product description by On-chip
15:10 – 15:40 Webinar
15:40 – 16:00 Q & A
[Registration]:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_7TEuGoNNSa-sZEfiPauDlg
Abstract:
Authors: Ayo Ogundero & William T Sloan
Affiliation: Infrastructure and Environment, School of Engineering, University of Glasgow
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Chlorination is standard practice in water treatment systems to kill microorganisms and maintain water quality. However, this treatment has been shown to increase the uptake of extracellular antimicrobial resistance genes by bacteria ( Jin et al., 2020). To prevent this and optimise the disinfection process there is the need to characterise how the whole microbial community responds to chlorine. Unfortunately, conventional culturing methods make it difficult to capture the diversity of environmental samples and assess the function of slow growing and rare bacteria (Saito et al., 2021).
To overcome this, we expose environmental bacteria from a water reservoir to different concentrations of sodium hypochlorite and encapsulate them as single cells in hundreds of thousands of droplets with a fluorescent RNA probe. As the bacteria grow the fluorescence increases, allowing the droplet to be distinguished from those that contain non-growing bacteria and sorted using flow cytometry. We collect fluorescent droplets on day 1,3 and 7 to reveal the differing bacterial composition and demonstrate using flow cytometry assays that bacteria that are slower growing show an increase in ROS production, membrane damage and depolarisation which indicates they are more likely to increase the transmission of antimicrobial resistant genes. For example, when exposed to 5mg/L of chlorine, the bacteria that take 7 days to grow show a 5-fold increase in membrane depolarisation compared to the bacteria that grow after 24 hours. These findings give us further insight into the slow-growing chlorine injured bacteria, and their potential role in the transmission of antibiotic resistance genes and instigates new approaches for water treatment management.
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Looking forward to e-meeting you!