A High-Throughput Cidality Screen for Mycobacterium Tuberculosis

Exposure to Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) aerosols is a major threat to tuberculosis (TB) researchers, even in bio-safety level-3 (BSL-3) facilities. Automation and high-throughput screens (HTS) in BSL3 facilities are essential for minimizing manual aerosol-generating interventions and facilitating TB research. In the present study, we report the development and validation of a high-throughput, 24-well ‘spot-assay’ for selecting bactericidal compounds against Mtb. The bactericidal screen concept was first validated in the fast-growing surrogate Mycobacterium smegmatis (Msm) and subsequently confirmed in Mtb using the following reference anti-tubercular drugs: rifampicin, isoniazid, ofloxacin and ethambutol (RIOE, acting on different targets). The potential use of the spot-assay to select bactericidal compounds from a large library was confirmed by screening on Mtb, with parallel plating by the conventional gold standard method (correlation, r² = 0.808). An automated spot-assay further enabled an MBC90 determination on resistant and sensitive Mtb clinical isolates. The implementation of the spot-assay in kinetic screens to enumerate residual Mtb after either genetic silencing (anti-sense RNA, AS-RNA) or chemical inhibition corroborated its ability to detect cidality. This relatively simple, economical and quantitative HTS considerably minimized the bio-hazard risk and enabled the selection of novel vulnerable Mtb targets and mycobactericidal compounds. Thus, spot-assays have great potential to impact the TB drug discovery process.