Nanofabricated structures and microfluidic devices for bacteria: from techniques to biology

Abstract

Nanofabricated structures and microfluidic technologies are increasingly being used to study bacteria because of their precise spatial and temporal control. They have facilitated studying many long-standing questions regarding growth, chemotaxis and cell-fate switching, and opened up new areas such as probing the effect of boundary geometries on the subcellular structure and social behavior of bacteria. We review the use of nano/microfabricated structures that spatially separate bacteria for quantitative analyses and that provide topological constraints on their growth and chemical communications. These approaches are becoming modular and broadly applicable, and show a strong potential for dissecting the complex life of bacteria at various scales and engineering synthetic microbial societies.