Antibiotic resistance is not always easy to detect. In some bacterial infections, most cells may appear susceptible to an antibiotic, while a very small subpopulation can survive treatment. This phenomenon, called heteroresistance, is clinically important because these rare resistant cells can expand during antibiotic...
Natural Killer cells are promising tools for cancer immunotherapy because they can recognize and kill tumor cells without prior antigen sensitization. However, NK cell products are not uniform. Within the same sample, some NK cells may kill efficiently, some may kill slowly, some may...
Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that infect bacteria. They have shaped molecular biology for decades and are gaining renewed attention. However, studying how phages infect bacteria comes with technical challenges. The classic double-layer plaque assay has long been the standard method for phage quantification,...
Screening for microbial proteolytic activity is essential in various biotechnological applications, including bioenergy, food processing, and pharmaceuticals. Traditional methods, such as cultivation on agar plates with skimmed milk, often result in low throughput and potential false positives from non-proteolytic activities. The need for more accurate,...
In droplet microfluidics, high-throughput screening is critical for analyzing large cellular or molecular libraries at single-cell resolution. However, achieving high sorting accuracy remains a challenge, especially with the droplet size variability inherent in multi-step assays or extended incubations. Conventional microfluidic sorting methods, such as those...