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Shedding light on biology of bacterial cells

To understand basic principles of living organisms one has to know many different properties of all cellular components, their mutual interactions but also their amounts and spatial organization. Live-cell imaging is one possible approach to obtain such data. To get multiple snapshots of a cellular...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Schneider, Johannes P., Basler, Marek
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5052743/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27672150
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0499
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author Schneider, Johannes P.
Basler, Marek
author_facet Schneider, Johannes P.
Basler, Marek
author_sort Schneider, Johannes P.
collection PubMed
description To understand basic principles of living organisms one has to know many different properties of all cellular components, their mutual interactions but also their amounts and spatial organization. Live-cell imaging is one possible approach to obtain such data. To get multiple snapshots of a cellular process, the imaging approach has to be gentle enough to not disrupt basic functions of the cell but also have high temporal and spatial resolution to detect and describe the changes. Light microscopy has become a method of choice and since its early development over 300 years ago revolutionized our understanding of living organisms. As most cellular components are indistinguishable from the rest of the cellular contents, the second revolution came from a discovery of specific labelling techniques, such as fusions to fluorescent proteins that allowed specific tracking of a component of interest. Currently, several different tags can be tracked independently and this allows us to simultaneously monitor the dynamics of several cellular components and from the correlation of their dynamics to infer their respective functions. It is, therefore, not surprising that live-cell fluorescence microscopy significantly advanced our understanding of basic cellular processes. Current cameras are fast enough to detect changes with millisecond time resolution and are sensitive enough to detect even a few photons per pixel. Together with constant improvement of properties of fluorescent tags, it is now possible to track single molecules in living cells over an extended period of time with a great temporal resolution. The parallel development of new illumination and detection techniques allowed breaking the diffraction barrier and thus further pushed the resolution limit of light microscopy. In this review, we would like to cover recent advances in live-cell imaging technology relevant to bacterial cells and provide a few examples of research that has been possible due to imaging. This article is part of the themed issue ‘The new bacteriology’.
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spelling pubmed-50527432016-11-05 Shedding light on biology of bacterial cells Schneider, Johannes P. Basler, Marek Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci Articles To understand basic principles of living organisms one has to know many different properties of all cellular components, their mutual interactions but also their amounts and spatial organization. Live-cell imaging is one possible approach to obtain such data. To get multiple snapshots of a cellular process, the imaging approach has to be gentle enough to not disrupt basic functions of the cell but also have high temporal and spatial resolution to detect and describe the changes. Light microscopy has become a method of choice and since its early development over 300 years ago revolutionized our understanding of living organisms. As most cellular components are indistinguishable from the rest of the cellular contents, the second revolution came from a discovery of specific labelling techniques, such as fusions to fluorescent proteins that allowed specific tracking of a component of interest. Currently, several different tags can be tracked independently and this allows us to simultaneously monitor the dynamics of several cellular components and from the correlation of their dynamics to infer their respective functions. It is, therefore, not surprising that live-cell fluorescence microscopy significantly advanced our understanding of basic cellular processes. Current cameras are fast enough to detect changes with millisecond time resolution and are sensitive enough to detect even a few photons per pixel. Together with constant improvement of properties of fluorescent tags, it is now possible to track single molecules in living cells over an extended period of time with a great temporal resolution. The parallel development of new illumination and detection techniques allowed breaking the diffraction barrier and thus further pushed the resolution limit of light microscopy. In this review, we would like to cover recent advances in live-cell imaging technology relevant to bacterial cells and provide a few examples of research that has been possible due to imaging. This article is part of the themed issue ‘The new bacteriology’. The Royal Society 2016-11-05 /pmc/articles/PMC5052743/ /pubmed/27672150 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0499 Text en © 2016 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Articles
Schneider, Johannes P.
Basler, Marek
Shedding light on biology of bacterial cells
title Shedding light on biology of bacterial cells
title_full Shedding light on biology of bacterial cells
title_fullStr Shedding light on biology of bacterial cells
title_full_unstemmed Shedding light on biology of bacterial cells
title_short Shedding light on biology of bacterial cells
title_sort shedding light on biology of bacterial cells
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5052743/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27672150
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0499
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