Monitoring single-cell bioenergetics via the coarsening of emulsion droplets.

ABSTRACT: Microorganisms are widely used to generate valuable products, and their efficiency is a major industrial focus. Bioreactors are typically composed of billions of cells, and available measurements only reflect the overall performance of the population. However, cells do not equally contribute, and process optimization would therefore benefit from monitoring this intrapopulation diversity. Such monitoring has so far remained difficult because of the inability to probe concentration changes at the single-cell level. Here, we unlock this limitation by taking advantage of the osmotically driven water flux between a droplet containing a living cell toward surrounding empty droplets, within a concentrated inverse emulsion. With proper formulation, excreted products are far more soluble within the

SUBMITTER: Boitard L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3358915 | biostudies-literature | 2012 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature