Issue 37, 2021

Imaging the oxygen wave with a single bioluminescent bacterium

Abstract

We developed a capability of a monolayer of bioluminescent (BL) bacteria for spatiotemporally visualizing the heterogeneous distribution and dynamic evolution of interfacial oxygen concentration, resulting in the discovery of spontaneous and stochastic oxygen waves at the interface between the substrate and an undisturbed, apparently still solution. Wild type bacteria, P. phosphoreum, spontaneously emit light during the native metabolism processes, i.e., bioluminescence. The emission intensity is sensitively regulated by oxygen concentration. By taking the electrolysis of water as a model, it was demonstrated that time-lapsed BL imaging of a bacterial monolayer allowed for visualizing the dynamic distribution of oxygen. The results were quantitatively understood with a physical model involving the diffusion equation and Michaelis–Menten equation. Unexpectedly, further study uncovered a spontaneous and stochastic oxygen wave in a standard well of a microtiter plate, which was subsequently attributed to the inevitable micro-convections induced by inhomogeneous evaporation and thermal fluctuation. Because of the wide application of microtiter plates, this study sheds new light to better understand the apparent heterogeneity in cell-culture and bio-assays.

Graphical abstract: Imaging the oxygen wave with a single bioluminescent bacterium

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
18 Jun 2021
Accepted
12 Aug 2021
First published
12 Aug 2021
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2021,12, 12400-12406

Imaging the oxygen wave with a single bioluminescent bacterium

Y. Li, S. Wang, X. He, S. Li, T. Zheng, Y. Chen, H. Cui and W. Wang, Chem. Sci., 2021, 12, 12400 DOI: 10.1039/D1SC03310G

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements