How do bacteria – harmless ones living in our bodies, or those that cause disease – organize their activities? A new study, combining powerful genomic-scale microscopy with a technical innovation, captured which genes bacteria turn on in different situations and in different spatial environments. The technology, described January 23 in Science, promises to take the study of bacteria to the next level.
Jeffrey Moffitt, PhD, and colleagues in the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine (PCMM) at Boston Children’s Hospital applied MERFISH, a molecular imaging technique Moffitt helped develop, to profile messenger RNAs – representing thousands of genes – in thousands of single bacteria simultaneously. MERFISH also captured spatial information, revealing how spatial factors influence what genes…