Single-cell reporters for pathogen responses to antimicrobial host attacks

Host-pathogen interactions are often heterogeneous involving individual encounters between host and pathogen cells with diverse molecular mechanisms, response networks, and diverging outcomes. Single-cell reporters can identify the various types of interactions and participating pathogen subsets, help to unravel underlying molecular mechanism, and determine individual outcomes and their impact on disease progression. In this review, we discuss reporters-based on fluorescent proteins. We present different types of reporters and their experimental advantages and challenges, and describe how different strategies can interrogate exposure to antimicrobial host mechanism, pathogen response, inflicted damage, and impact on pathogen fitness at the single-cell level. We find many gaps in available tools but also exciting avenues to address these issues.