Effectiveness of Microbiological Assays as an Alternative Method to Determine the Potency of Antibiotics: A Review

Year 2024, Volume: 44 Issue: 2, 153 - 164, 01.06.2024

Sultana Rajia , Yuki Fujii , Sarkar M. A. Kawsar , Yasuhiro Ozeki , Md. Sarwar Jahan , Imtiaj Hasan

https://doi.org/10.52794/hujpharm.1354419

Abstract

In this review, chemical and biological assays performed in the pharmaceutical industry to determine the potency and bioactivity of antibiotics are discussed. Though commonly employed chemical methods can measure the potency of antibiotics, inefficiency in estimating the bioactivity is one of their major limitations. Due to their sensitivity and cost-effectiveness, common microbiological assays can serve as alternative methods. Several factors like doses of antibiotics, homogeneity of agar medium, inoculum concentration, the chemical composition of agar media, size and solubility of samples or drug molecules, pH, relative humidity and exposure time can influence microbiological assays. Based on specific requirements and experimental targets, agar diffusion assays are designed focusing on their costs, errors, accuracy and simplicity. To avoid the misuse and overuse of antibiotics that lead to drug-resistance, parameters like zone of inhibition, minimum inhibitory concentration, minimum bactericidal concentration, mutation prevention concentration and critical concentration are also discussed in this study. Finally, microbiological and high-performance liquid chromatography methods were specifically compared for their sensitivity, accuracy and assessment of biological activity with minimal cost. Due to their advantages and disadvantages, parallel use of both bioassays and chemical methods are suggested to precisely determine the potency of antibiotics.

Keywords

Bioassay, antibiotics, alternative method, cost-effective, microbiological assay

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