Functional Assessment of Microbial, Viral, and Parasitic Infections Using Real-Time Cellular Analysis

An ability to monitor cells in real time has the potential to help elucidate the mechanisms underlying health and disease in diverse areas of biomedical research and clinical diagnostics. In the specific contexts of microbial, viral, and parasitic infections, being able to continuously track the structural and functional changes that occur in the host or pathogen cells can be used for clinical diagnosis, monitoring treatment efficacy, etc. The xCELLigence® Real-Time Cell Analysis (RTCA) instrument from ACEA Biosciences is a label-free microelectronic sensor-based technology that enables live cell analysis for these purposes. Using the principle of cellular impedance, RTCA dynamically monitors changes in cell number, cell size, cell-cell interactions (i.e., barrier function), and cell-substrate attachment quality to provide a wealth of information that is missed using traditional endpoint assays. In this chapter, we describe using RTCA to identify, quantify, and dynamically monitor bacterial, viral, and parasitic infections. Using recent publications, we demonstrate the application of RTCA for diverse aspects of microbiology, including bacterial toxin detection, virus-induced cytopathic effect quantification, neutralizing antibody detection, bacterial biofilm antibiotic susceptibility screening, and anthelmintic drug screening, as well as functional analysis of host immune cell activity. RTCA is shown to display great promise both for clinical detection of toxins/pathogens and for ex vivo theranostic purposes.