A microfluidic concentrator array for studying predatory bacteria

Abstract

We present a novel microfluidic concentrator array that can be used for studying the predation behavior of Bdellovib-rio and Like Organisms (BALOs) toward various prey strains. We demonstrate that the compartmentalized concentration array facilitates understanding the interaction between prey and predator at both the cellular and population level by directly observing the predation of a single B. bacteriovorus and by measuring the fluorescence intensities of E.coli cells expressing green fluorescence proteins (GFP). To date, the predation of BALOs has not been well studied due to its small size and fast motility, which causes difficulty when trying to characterize the relationship between the predatory and prey microbes. However, the method proposed in this work makes it possible to characterize even the transient predation behavior with high resolution so that we believe that BALOs would be broadly used to mitigate biofilm and biofouling.