Lab-on-a-chip for tracking single bacterial cells

Researchers at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, together with researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, have set up a novel lab-on-a-chip with accompanying automatic analysis software. As they report in Nature Communications, this integrated setup can be used to study gene regulation in single bacterial cells in response to dynamically controlled environmental changes. 

It is hardly bigger than a matchbox and yet there is a laboratory en miniature on this chip. Single bacterial cells grow in about 2000 channels of a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter and can be individually studied in detail by the researchers in Prof. Erik van Nimwegen's group at the Biozentrum, University of Basel.

By recording thousands of microscopic images at short time intervals, the precise growth and behavior of many generations of individual E. coli bacteria can be tracked over several days.

The huge amount of raw data generated is automatically analyzed, and precisely quantified by new image-analysis software called MoMA. The software was developed in collaboration with scientists from Prof. Gene Myers' research group at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden.

Using the new system the researchers can now study precisely how genes are regulated in single cells under changing environmental conditions. This way, they do not only gain insights into gene regulatory processes but also an overview of the diversity of adaptive responses of bacteria to varying environments.