LAUSR

Significance Rapid detection of pathogenic bacteria in clinical samples within a few minutes is the key to infectious disease control and precise medicine. Existing methods require time-consuming processes such as sample pretreatment, recognition, and signal amplification. This work establishes an ultra-rapid strategy for bacteria detection by direct bacteria morphological identification in free solution via a label-free single-particle imaging approach. It does not require any biological reagents and can directly detect bacteria in clinical samples within 10 min. We believe such a label-free single-particle imaging approach for rapid bacteria screening will have wide applications in clinical diagnosis and disease control due to its high sensitivity, simplicity, rapidity, and low cost.