A micro-perfusion system for characterizing dense bacterial populations

Date: Tuesday, December 5

Time: 16:00-17:00

Location: Lab5, Level D, L5D23

Speaker: Prof. Kazumasa A. Takeuchi, The University of Tokyo

Title :  A micro-perfusion system for characterizing dense bacterial populations

Abstract:

Bacteria often live in the form of dense aggregates such as biofilms. It is therefore important to characterize dense populations of bacteria, but is also challenging because of the difficulty in maintaining a uniform growth condition for dense populations. Here we overcome this by a microfluidic device named the "extensive micro-perfusion system" [1], which supplies nutrients through a porous membrane uniformly to the cells. In the seminar, I will describe characterics of the device and present a few applications that we carried out to characterize different aspects of dense bacterial populations, namely, the response of cell sizes to environmental changes [1], glass transitions of motile bacteria [2], and aggregate pattern formation of starving bacteria.

[1] T. Shimaya et al., Commun. Phys. 4, 238 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-021-00739-5

[2] H. Lama et al., arXiv:2205.10436 https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.10436