High-throughput 3D tracking of bacteria on a standard phase contrast microscope

K.M. Taute, S. Gude, S.J. Tans and T.S. Shimizu ()
Additional contact information
K.M. Taute: FOM Institute AMOLF
S. Gude: FOM Institute AMOLF
S.J. Tans: FOM Institute AMOLF
T.S. Shimizu: FOM Institute AMOLF

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Bacteria employ diverse motility patterns in traversing complex three-dimensional (3D) natural habitats. 2D microscopy misses crucial features of 3D behaviour, but the applicability of existing 3D tracking techniques is constrained by their performance or ease of use. Here we present a simple, broadly applicable, high-throughput 3D bacterial tracking method for use in standard phase contrast microscopy. Bacteria are localized at micron-scale resolution over a range of 350 × 300 × 200 μm by maximizing image cross-correlations between their observed diffraction patterns and a reference library. We demonstrate the applicability of our technique to a range of bacterial species and exploit its high throughput to expose hidden contributions of bacterial individuality to population-level variability in motile behaviour. The simplicity of this powerful new tool for bacterial motility research renders 3D tracking accessible to a wider community and paves the way for investigations of bacterial motility in complex 3D environments.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9776 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms9776

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms9776

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().