In this project, researchers Jie Wang (Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Mingxing Zhang (Chemistry) will investigate the growth dynamic of bacterial biofilm with lattice light-sheet microscopy (LLSM), which is able to resolve individual cells within thick 3D biofilms in a non-invasive manner. The researchers will also plan to develop a broadly-applicable, fully-automated, 3D bacterial cell segmentation and image analysis toolkit. The extension of proposed algorithms to the machine learning framework will simplify the process of single cell detection for general biofilm study.
This interdisciplinary collaboration between biochemistry, and electrical and computer engineering permits the study on cellular behaviors and cell-cell interactions in bacterial biofilms at unprecedented levels of detail. The results of this project will broadly impact biomedical, biotechnological, and chemical process industries that rely on understanding how bacterial communities assemble and function.
Read the bioRxiv publication:
Non-Invasive Single-Cell Morphometry in Living Bacterial Biofilms
