Use of a surface plasmon resonance method to investigate antibiotic and plasma protein interactions.

The pharmacologic effect of an antibiotic is directly related to its unbound concentration at the site of infection. Most commercial antibiotics have been selected in part for their low propensity to interact with serum proteins. These nonspecific interactions are classically evaluated by measuring the MIC in the presence of serum. As higher-throughput technologies tend to lose information, surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is emerging as an informative medium-throughput technology for hit validation. Here we show that SPR is a useful automatic tool for quantification of the interaction of model antibiotics with serum proteins and that it delivers precise real-time kinetic data on this critical parameter.