Development of BL Testers For On-site detection of Drug Resistant Bacteria

Hazra Lab developed three types of BL Testers for on-site detection of drug-resistant bacteria: 1. BL-tester Basic, 2. Environmental BL-Tester and 3. Advance BL tester. BL-tester Basic has three components: sample preparation vial, BL Tester vial, and dye-containing pouch. Antibiotics were used to screen for resistant bacteria in the BL tester. It can work with milk, urine, and soil samples. BL-tester Advance is based on bacterial culturing to reduce the detection time, i.e., about 2 hrs. It can work with clinical samples such as body fluids (saliva, pus, blood). Environmental BL Tester could detect drug-resistant bacterial presence within 30 minutes. This system can work to detect drug-resistant bacteria in wastewater, river water, ponds, and sewage samples. BL Environmental works on four types of filter chambers, with filter sizes ranging from 1mm to 0.45μm diameter to concentrate bacteria. Chromogenic dye has been used in every BL Tester, which can change its color from yellow (λmax 390) to red (λmax 486) in the presence of drug-resistant bacteria. The total duration to detect drug resistance was 5 hours for BL tester Basic, while advance BL tester took 2 hours and Environmental took only 30 minutes. The naked eye visualizes results and can be analyzed by an untrained person. The intensity of the color (red) was directly proportional to drug-resistant bacterial load in the samples. BL Testers are easy, fast, reliable, and less costly for detecting drug-resistant bacteria in clinical and non-clinical samples.