Cultivating Efficiency: High-Throughput Growth Analysis of Anaerobic Bacteria in Compact Microplate Readers
April 10, 2024
The University of Arizona Superfund Research Center (UA SRC) Project 3 team recently reported the results of a microbial cultivation study that can speed the discovery of novel metabolites and facilitate dose-response studies of various drugs and toxins on the microbiome.
Anaerobic, or oxygen-free, microbes play crucial roles in environmental processes, industry, and human health. Traditional methods for monitoring the growth of anaerobes, including plate counts or subsampling broth cultures for optical density measurements, are time and resource-intensive. The arrival of microplate readers revolutionized bacterial growth studies by enabling high-throughput and real-time monitoring of microbial growth kinetics. Yet, their use in anaerobic microbiology has remained limited.
This study presents a high-throughput cultivation and growth analysis pipeline based on inexpensive small-footprint microplate readers to overcome some of the challenges associated with microbial growth analysis in anaerobic conditions (Fig. 1).
This approach provided results consistent with a name-brand microplate reader system, facilitating the analysis of samples inside an anaerobic chamber, increasing the speed of research, and providing insight into anaerobe growth and metabolism.
This technology can be used for applications where high throughput would advance discovery, including microbial isolation, bioprospecting, co-culturing, host-microbe interactions, and drug/toxin-microbial interactions. Cultivation will spur the discovery of novel metabolites and probiotics and facilitate dose-response studies of various drugs and toxins on the microbiome.
Publication:
Snoeyenbos-West OLO, Guerrero CR, Valencia M, Carini P. 0. Cultivating efficiency: high-throughput growth analysis of anaerobic bacteria in compact microplate readers. Microbiol Spectr 0:e03650-23. https://doi.org/10.1128/spectrum.03650-23