A Noninvasive Method for Time-Lapse Imaging of Microbial Interactions and Colony Dynamics
Carlos Molina‐Santiago, J. R. A. Pearson, María Victoria Berlanga‐Clavero, Alicia Isabel Pérez‐Lorente, Antonio de Vicente, Diego Romero
Abstract
Communication and interactions between single cells are continuously defining the structure and composition of microbial communities temporally and spatially. Methods routinely used to study these communities at the cellular level rely on sample manipulation which makes microscopic time-lapse experiments impossible. BacLive was conceived as a method for the noninvasive study of the formation and development of bacterial communities, such as biofilms, and the formation dynamics of specialized subpopulations in time-lapse experiments at a colony level. In addition, we developed a tool to simplify the processing and analysis of the data generated by this method.