Plasmonic metasurface microfluidic accelerates redox reactions for rapid phenotypic antibiotic susceptibility testing.

Plasmonic metasurface microfluidic accelerates bacterial identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing with high accuracy in urine samples.

• Why it matters: Rapid and accurate diagnostics are critical for effective treatment of bacterial infections, yet current methods often require lengthy culture periods.
• What they did: The study used multilayered plasmonic metasurfaces combined with machine learning to enhance electromagnetic fields and hot electron injection, accelerating redox reactions for bacterial detection and susceptibility profiling across diverse species, including clinical urine samples.
• The result: This approach enabled rapid bacterial identification with no cross-reactivity and phenotypic antibiotic susceptibility testing without overnight culture, showing high accuracy and strong agreement with standard microbiology assays.