Monitoring microbial communities using light sheet fluorescence microscopy
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biophysics, Microbiology
- Keywords
- light sheet fluorescence microscopy, microbial communities, microscopy, microbiota
- Copyright
- © 2017 Parthasarathy
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Monitoring microbial communities using light sheet fluorescence microscopy. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3135v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3135v1
Abstract
Microbes often live in dense, dynamic, multi-species communities whose architecture and function are intimately intertwined. Imaging these complex, three-dimensional ensembles presents considerable technical challenges, however. In this review, I describe light sheet fluorescence microscopy, a technique that enables rapid acquisition of three-dimensional images over large fields of view and over long durations, and I highlight recent applications of this method to microbial systems that include artificial closed ecosystems, bacterial biofilms, and gut microbiota. I comment also on the history of light sheet imaging and the many variants of the method. Light sheet techniques have tremendous potential for illuminating the workings of microbial communities, a potential that is just beginning to be realized.
Author Comment
This invited review article has been submitted to Current Opinion in Microbiology. Comments are welcome, especially suggestions for shortening the text.
Supplemental Information
Supplemental Movie 1
A single optical plane, captured with light sheet fluorescence microscopy, of the anterior bulb region of the gut of a larval zebrafish, colonized with a GFP-expressing Plesiomonas species.
Supplemental Movie 2
Microsoft Word - Parthasarathy_Monitoring_Microbial_Communities_2017_preprint.docx Rendering of a three-dimensional light sheet fluorescence microscopy image of a commensal Aeromonas species in the gut of a larval zebrafish, as in Ref. [Wiles, Jemielita, et al. 2016].