Advances in aggregation induced emission (AIE) materials in biosensing and imaging of bacteria

Abstract

With their ubiquitous nature, bacteria have had a significant impact on human health and evolution. Though as commensals residing in/on our bodies several bacterial com munities support our health in many ways, bacteria remain one of the major causes of infectious diseases that plague the human world. Adding to this, emergence of antibi otic resistant strains limited the use of available antibiotics. The current available tech niques to prevent and control such infections remain insufficient. This has been proven during oneofgreatest pandemicofourgeneration,COVID-19.It hasbeenobservedthat bacterial coinfections were predominantly observed in COVID-19 patients, despite anti biotic treatment. Such higher rates of coinfections in critical patients even after antibi otic treatment is a matter of concern. Owing to many reasons across the world drug resistance in bacteria is posing a major problem i. According to Center for Disease control (CDC) antibiotic report threats (AR), 2019 more than 2.8 million antibiotic resis tant cases were reported, and more than 35,000 were dead among them in USA alone. In both normal and pandemic conditions, failure of identifying infectious agent has played a major role. This strongly prompts the need to improve upon the existing tech niques to not just effective identification of an unknown bacterium, but also to discrim inate normal Vs drug resistant strains. New techniques based on Aggregation Induced Emission (AIE) are not only simple and rapid but also have high accuracy to visualize infection and differentiate many strains of bacteria based on biomolecular variations which has been discussed in this chapter.