scanlag-high-throughput-quantification-of-colony-growth-and-lag-time

ScanLag: High-throughput Quantification of Colony Growth and Lag Time

Growth dynamics are fundamental characteristics of microorganisms. Quantifying growth precisely is an important goal in microbiology. Growth dynamics are ...

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

We developed an automated system, ScanLag, that measures in parallel the delay in growth (lag time) and growth rate of thousands of cells. Using ScanLag, we detected small subpopulations of bacteria with dramatically increased lag time upon starvation. By screening a library of Escherichia coli deletion mutants, we achieved two-dimensional mapping of growth characteristics, which showed that ScanLag enables multidimensional screens for quantitative characterization and identification of rare phenotypic variants.

Automated imaging with ScanLag reveals previously undetectable bacterial growth phenotypes.

Using a device termed the 'morbidostat', a recent study sheds new light on the determinism of genetic and phenotypic trajectories leading to high antibiotic resistance.

Whack-an-E. coli with the morbidostat.

Exponentially growing bacteria are rarely found in the wild, as microorganisms tend to spend most of their lifetime at stationary phase. Despite this general prevalence of stationary-phase bacteria, they are as yet poorly characterized. Our goal was to quantitatively study this phase by direct observation of single bacteria as they enter into stationary phase and by monitoring their activity over several days during growth arrest. For this purpose, we devised an experimental procedure for starving single Escherichia coli bacteria in microfluidic devices and measured their activity by monitoring the production rate of fluorescent proteins. When amino acids were the sole carbon source, the production rate decreased by an order of magnitude upon entry into stationary phase. We found that, even while growth-arrested, bacteria continued to produce proteins at a surprisingly constant rate over several days. Our identification of this newly observed period of constant activity in nongrowing cells, designated as constant activity stationary phase, makes possible the conduction of assays that require constant protein expression over time, and are therefore difficult to perform under exponential growth conditions. Moreover, we show that exogenous protein expression bears no fitness cost on the regrowth of the population when starvation ends. Further characterization of constant activity stationary phase-a phase where nongrowing bacteria can be quantitatively studied over several days in a reproducible manner-should contribute to a better understanding of this ubiquitous but overlooked physiological state of bacteria in nature.

Ofer Fridman

Racah Institute of Physics

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

ScanLag: High-throughput Quantification of Colony Growth and Lag Time

Ofer Fridman

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The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

ScanLag: High-throughput Quantification of Colony Growth and Lag Time

Racah Institute of Physics