Observing Growth and Division of Large Numbers of Individual Bacteria by Image Analysis

ABSTRACT We describe a method that enabled us to observe large numbers of individual bacterial cells during a long period of cell growth and proliferation. We designed a flow chamber in which the cells attached to a transparent solid surface. The flow chamber was mounted on a microscope equipped with a digital camera. The shear force of the flow removed the daughter cells, making it possible to monitor the consecutive divisions of a single cell. In this way, kinetic parameters and their distributions, as well as some physiological characteristics of the bacteria, could be analyzed based on more than 1,000 single-cell observations. The method which we developed enabled us to study the history effect on the distribution of the lag times of single cells.

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