Abstract

Analyzing bacteria activity is the key to gain insight on the viability and response of prokaryotic cells to changes in their environment. Classical methods to measure bacteria viability, however, are often time consuming or in the need of high bacterial densities for successful analysis. Here, we demonstrate how the movement of a single cell can be quantified by observing the interactions between an optically trapped bacterium and a silica bead, which are aligned next to each other in a dual beam optical tweezers configuration (Fig.1).

© 2013 IEEE