On March 1st,HOOKE INSTRUMENTS and Professor Wei E. Huang's team from Oxford University applied PRECI SCS, the core product of HOOKE INSTRUMENTS, and made a breakthrough in the study of intestinal drug-resistant bacteria. The results were published in Environmental, a well-known academic journal in the field of microbiology, under the title of "Raman-activated Sorting of sport-resistant Bacteria in Human Gut Microbiota" Microbiology. This study is the first to reveal that the drug-resistant bacteria in the gut and the composition of drug-resistant genes are related to the individual drug history at the single-cell level.

The antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) and antibiotic-resistant genes (ARGs) in human gut microbiota have significant impact on human health. While high throughput metagenomic sequencing reveals genotypes of microbial communities, the functionality, phenotype and heterogeneity of human gut microbiota are still elusive. In this study, we applied Raman microscopy and deuterium isotope probing (Raman-DIP) to detect metabolic active ARB (MA-ARB) in situ at the single-cell level in human gut microbiota from two healthy adults. We analysed the relative abundances of MA-ARB under different concentrations of amoxicillin, cephalexin, tetracycline, florfenicol and vancomycin. To establish the link between phenotypes and genotypes of the MA-ARB, Raman-activated cell sorting (RACS) was used to sort MA-ARB from human gut microbiota, and mini-metagenomic DNA of the sorted bacteria was amplified, sequenced and analysed. The sorted MA-ARB and their associated ARGs were identified. Our results suggest a strong relation between ARB in human gut microbiota and personal medical history. This study demonstrates that the toolkit of Raman-DIP, RACS and DNA sequencing can be useful to unravel both phenotypes and genotypes of ARB in human gut microbiota at the single-cell level.