Abstract
Recent advances in microscopy, computing power and image processing have enabled the analysis of ever larger datasets of movies of microorganisms to study their behaviour. However, techniques for analysing the dynamics of individual cells from such datasets are not yet widely available in the public domain. We recently demonstrated significant phenotypic heterogeneity in the adhesion of Escherichia coli bacteria to glass surfaces using a new method for the high-throughput analysis of video microscopy data. Here, we present an in-depth analysis of this method and its limitations, and make public our algorithms for following the positions and orientations of individual rod-shaped bacteria from time-series of 2D images to reconstruct their trajectories and characterise their dynamics. We demonstrate in detail how to use these algorithms to identify different types of adhesive dynamics within a clonal population of bacteria sedimenting onto a surface. The effects of measurement errors in cell positions and of limited trajectory durations on our results are discussed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0217823 |
| Journal | PLoS One |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2019 Vissers et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.