We implement an optical tweezers technique to assess the effects of chemical agents on single bacterial cells. As a proof of principle, the viability of a trapped Escherichia coli bacterium is determined by monitoring its flagellar motility in the presence of varying concentrations of ethyl alcohol. We show that the “killing time” of the bacterium can be effectively identified from the correlation statistics of the positional time series recorded from the trap, while direct quantification from the time series or associated power spectra is intractable. Our results, which minimize the lethal effects of bacterial photodamage, are consistent with previous reports of ethanol toxicity that used conventional culture-based methods. This approach can be adapted to study other pairwise combinations of drugs and motile bacteria, especially to measure the response times of single cells with better precision.
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