Mobile Based in Situ Detection of Live/Dead and Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria by Silver Nanorods Array Sensor Fabricated by Glancing Angle Deposition

The rapid in-situ detection of viability of bacteria is essential for human health and environmental care. It has become one of the biggest needs in biological and medical sciences to prevent infections and diseases, which usually occur in hospitals and field clinics. Nowadays, antibiotic resistance (ABR) has been grown as one of the world's acutest public health problems, which requires a quick and efficient solution. Here, we demonstrate am easy, sensitive, user-friendly, portable, cost effective and time saving approach for detection of live, dead and drug resistant bacteria. Most of the organisms are found to produce H
2
S gas by their metabolism system. The endogenous H
2
S evolution was targeted to differentiate between live and dead as well as ABR bacteria. The silver nanorods (AgNRs) arrays sensors were fabricated by glancing angle deposition technique. The colorimetric and water wettability (contact angle) features of as-synthesized AgNRs were found to be highly sensitive and selective for hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas. E.coli, P. aeruginosa, B. subtilis and S. aureus were used as the model organisms for this study. A drastic visible change in color as well as wetting properties of AgNRs array was observed. To make it easy, a user friendly and field deployable android based mobile app ‘Colorimetric Detector’ was developed. This dual mode detection is facile, inexpensive and can be easily scaled-up in the field of disease diagnosis.