Flow cytometry method for absolute counting and single-cell phenotyping of mycobacteria
More about Open Access at the CrickAuthors list
David A Barr Charles Omollo Mandy Mason Anastasia Koch Robert Wilkinson David G Lalloo Graeme Meintjes Valerie Mizrahi Digby F Warner Gerry DaviesAbstract
Detection and accurate quantitation of viable Mycobacterium tuberculosis is fundamental to understanding mycobacterial pathogenicity, tuberculosis (TB) disease progression and outcomes; TB transmission; drug action, efficacy and drug resistance. Despite this importance, methods for determining numbers of viable bacilli are limited in accuracy and precision owing to inherent characteristics of mycobacterial cell biology-including the tendency to clump, and "differential" culturability-and technical challenges consequent on handling an infectious pathogen under biosafe conditions. We developed an absolute counting method for mycobacteria in liquid cultures using a bench-top flow cytometer, and the low-cost fluorescent dyes Calcein-AM (CA) and SYBR-gold (SG). During exponential growth CA + cell counts are highly correlated with CFU counts and can be used as a real-time alternative to simplify the accurate standardisation of inocula for experiments. In contrast to CFU counting, this method can detect and enumerate cell aggregates in samples, which we show are a potential source of variance and bias when using established methods. We show that CFUs comprise a sub-population of intact, metabolically active mycobacterial cells in liquid cultures, with CFU-proportion varying by growth conditions. A pharmacodynamic application of the flow cytometry method, exploring kinetics of fluorescent probe defined subpopulations compared to CFU is demonstrated. Flow cytometry derived Mycobacterium bovis bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) time-kill curves differ for rifampicin and kanamycin versus isoniazid and ethambutol, as do the relative dynamics of discrete morphologically-distinct subpopulations of bacilli revealed by this high-throughput single-cell technique.
Journal details
Journal Scientific Reports
Volume 11
Issue number 1
Pages 18661
Available online
Publication date
Full text links
Publisher website (DOI) 10.1038/s41598-021-98176-5
Europe PubMed Central 34545154
Pubmed 34545154
Keywords
Related topics
Type of publication