Researchers have created a novel imaging-technology combination that can capture gene activity in individual bacteria in their complex local environments, opening new avenues to investigate bacterial interaction, virulence, and antibiotic resistance.
- By NANCY FLIESLER | Boston Children's
The work, federally supported by the National Institutes of Health and Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), is described Jan. 24 in Science.
Senior author Jeffrey Moffitt, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of microbiology and of pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital, and colleagues combined two techniques - MERFISH and expansion microscopy - to profile messenger RNAs (mRNAs) in thousands of bacteria simultaneously. These RNAs represent the activity of thousands of genes. Before now, scientists could only track bacterial gene activity by averaging it across a population of bacteria.
