Tracking bacterial lineages in complex and dynamic environments with applications to growth control and persistence

Abstract

As bacteria transition from exponential to stationary phase they change greatly in size, morphology, growth and expression-profiles. These responses also vary between individual cells, but it has proven difficult to track cell lineages along the growth curve to determine the progression of events or correlations between how individual cells enter and exit dormancy. We developed a platform for tracking >105 parallel cell lineages in dense and changing cultures, independently validating that the imaged cells closely track batch populations. Initial applications show that for both Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis, growth changes from an adder mode in exponential phase to mixed adders-timers entering stationary phase, and then a near-perfect sizer upon exit - creating broadly distributed cell sizes in stationary phase but rapidly returning to narrowly distributed sizes upon exit. Furthermore, cells that undergo more divisions entering stationary phase suffer reduced survival after long periods of dormancy but are the only cells observed that persist against antibiotics.