Generation of bacterial gradeient in a droplet array for analyzing microbial communication

Abstract

Most of cells communicate with other species and response by releasing and detecting the secreted molecules. Bacteria often use intra/interspecies communication to assess their population density in a process called quorum sensing (QS). Although some of the QS mechanisms are understood, however, due to experimental challenges, this fundamental hypothesis has never been investigated. Here we present a micro-droplet array that can generates a bacterial dual population gradient into a parallel series of droplet. This micro-droplet array enables the investigation of cell-cell communication in response to the ratio of two microbial population.