iChip Isn’t Off the Same Old Block
By Jen Obrigewitch, Biology, 2017
You’ve been sick for days and midterms are coming up, so you drag yourself to health services. The doctor comes in and shoves medical instruments in your ears, mouth, and nose before deciding that you have an infection; you need antibiotics. He gives you a prescription, but for some reason it doesn’t work.
You go back, and he explains how repeated exposures to the same antibiotic will result in the infection-causing bacteria evolving into a strain that has become immune to its most commonly used antibiotic and a new one needs to be used. A few years later, you are again infected, and the doctor must prescribe a third antibiotic to eradicate the infection, because resistance has been developed for yet another antibiotic.
This process is a continuous cycle, with every new antibiotic eventually becoming defunct. One way to replenish the store of antibiotics is for scientists to find new bacteria that naturally release compounds able to kill the target infection. However, there are multitudes of bacteria in the soil that scientists have not been able to study in laboratory settings, that is until recently.
In Northeastern’s biology department, Kim Lewis and Slava Epstein have developed a new technology that enables sensitive bacteria to grow in conditions more similar to its natural environment, rather than in a regulation lab petri dish.
Using the iChip, 5,000% more bacteria cells are able to successfully grow into colonies. Traditionally, only 1% of cells are able to grow in an agar petri dish; with this device, that number nears 50%.
A sample containing the desired bacterial cells is collected from the soil and diluted to a concentration of one bacterial cell per 20 microliters of solution. This is then distributed onto the surface of the iChip, which is composed of many 20 microliter chambers. Thus, approximately one bacterial cell is present in each chamber.
Next, the iChip is buried in the ground for one month, where the nutrients in the soil that normally help the cells to develop are available to aid in the growth of the laboratory-regulated cells. After the incubation period is over, the thriving bacterial colonies in each of the device’s chambers are streaked onto separate agar plates to enable further colony growth and purification.
These bacterial colonies are then tested against the infectious bacteria: if the new bacteria destroys the infection, then the colonies must be able to release a compound that naturally destroys the infection. Once the genome of the bacteria is sequenced and the compound with antibiotic properties is identified, development of the human antibiotic begins amongst a myriad of side effect and efficiency trials.
Though the iChip is new and has a long way to go before its associated antibiotics are stocked on the shelves in pharmacies across the world, the development of this technology is a monumental step in improving the capabilities of modern medicine. The potential discoveries that could be made using this device are astronomical: the sky, or rather the soil, is the limit.