Quantifying Variation in Bacterial Reproductive Fitness: a High-Throughput Method
Pascal M. Frey, Julian Baer, Judith Bergadà-Pijuan, Conor Lawless, Philipp Bühler, Roger D. Kouyos, Katherine P. Lemon, Annelies S. Zinkernagel, Silvio D. Brugger
Abstract
Reproductive fitness of bacteria is a major factor in the evolution and persistence of antimicrobial resistance and may play an important role in severe infections. With a computational approach to quantify fitness in bacteria growing competitively on agar plates, our high-throughput method has been designed to obtain additional phenotypic data for antimicrobial resistance analysis at a low cost. Furthermore, our bacterial quantitative fitness analysis (BaQFA) enables the investigation of a link between bacterial fitness and clinical outcomes in severe invasive bacterial infections. This may allow future use of our method for patient management and risk stratification of clinical outcomes. Our proposed method uses open-source software and a hardware setup that can utilize consumer electronics. This will enable a wider community of researchers, including those from low-resource countries, where the burden of antimicrobial resistance is highest, to obtain valuable information about emerging bacterial strains.