Antimicrobial drug susceptibility tests involving multiple time-consuming steps are still used as reference methods. Today, there is a need for the development of new automated instruments that can provide faster results and reduce operating time, reagent costs, and labor requirements. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy meets those requirements. The metabolism and antimicrobial susceptibility of Escherichia coli ATCC 25922 in the presence of gentamicin have been analyzed using NMR and compared with a reference method. Direct incubation of the bacteria (with and without gentamicin) into the NMR tube has also been performed, and differences in the NMR spectra were obtained. The MIC, determined by the reference method found in this study, would correspond with the termination of the bacterial metabolism observed with NMR. Experiments carried out directly into the NMR tube enabled the development of antimicrobial drug susceptibility tests to assess the effectiveness of the antibiotic. NMR is an objective and reproducible method for showing the effects of a drug on the subject bacterium and can emerge as an excellent tool for studying bacterial activity in the presence of different antibiotic concentrations.
Infectious diseases remain a challenge in terms of mortality and morbidity despite the great progress achieved in public health in recent decades. For this reason, antimicrobial susceptibility evaluations and new antibiotic screenings are a field of great importance (1). Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) studies are crucial to determine the most effective drug available for the treatment of a patient with an infectious disease process. Currently, automated in vitro AST systems are used with standardized methods and conditions to determine the MIC of a drug. These tests usually function by visually judging liquid turbidity, and are one of the reference methods still used today. Unfortunately, these tests involve multiple time-consuming steps, which are often slow, laborious, and susceptible to testing sensitivity problems (2, 3). Moreover, these methods should be useful against pathogens whose susceptibility to drugs is not predictable, thus enabling researchers to determine the antimicrobial susceptibility of fastidious organisms (4) and of those microorganisms that have acquired resistance mechanisms. Measuring the susceptibility of microorganisms to antimicrobials began in the early 1920s (5). Subsequently, there was recognition (as early as the late 1950s) that required the standardization of these techniques. Therefore, numerous AST methods have been described (6). However, there is currently a need for the development of new automated instruments that can provide faster results, reduce reagent cost, and minimize labor requirements (7,8). In this context, several methods were recently established to minimize the time required to complete the test and the number of operation steps (9, 10).Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has been used as a method to determine structures of synt...