Division of Biology, IISER Pune, Central Tower, Sai Trinity, Pashan, Pune 411021, India.
Bioinformatics. 2011 Nov 1;27(21):2944-8. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btr501. Epub 2011 Sep 19.
Cell sizes and shapes are a fundamental defining characteristic of all cellular life. In bacteria like Escherichia coli, the machinery that determines cell length is complex and interconnected, spanning extracellular cues, biosynthesis and cell division. Few tools exist to study cell lengths in a population. We have developed and tested three automated image analysis routines on growing E.coli cultures to simultaneously measure cell lengths and nucleoid numbers in populations of bacteria. We find population profiles changing with culture density-higher density of culture leads to fewer long cells. Additionally, lab strains mutant for recA show a correlation between the number of nucleoids and cell length.
cathale@iiserpune.ac.in; chaitanya.athale@gmail.com.
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
细胞的大小和形状是所有细胞生命的基本定义特征。在大肠杆菌等细菌中，决定细胞长度的机制是复杂和相互关联的，涉及细胞外线索、生物合成和细胞分裂。目前很少有工具可以用于研究群体中的细胞长度。我们开发并测试了三种自动化图像分析程序，用于生长中的大肠杆菌培养物，以同时测量细菌群体中的细胞长度和核区数量。我们发现，随着培养密度的增加，种群分布会发生变化——较高的培养密度会导致较长的细胞数量减少。此外，recA 突变的实验室菌株显示出核区数量和细胞长度之间的相关性。
cathale@iiserpune.ac.in; chaitanya.athale@gmail.com。
补充数据可在“Bioinformatics”在线获取。
