Development of an Automated Online Flow Cytometry Method to Quantify Cell Concentration and Fingerprint Bacterial Communities

Flow cytometry is a powerful method for the quantification of microorganisms, unparalleled by other technologies. We will (1) give an overview of the benefits and use cases of flow cytometry for microbial analysis, (2) highlight how flow cytometry can be used to track microbial dynamics with the state-of-the-art method of online flow cytometry, and (3) will dive into an example of how the CytoFLEX can be used to quantify microbial community dynamics as published in our recent paper. We will explain in detail how we coupled the CytoFLEX with the OC-300 automation device from onCyt Microbiology. Our procedure allows for the online automated determination of cell concentrations and for the differentiation between different cell subsets of a bacterial community (such as different strains and phenotypes). Our method can reproducibly measure both cell concentration and fingerprint-like patterns of bacterial communities, generating suitable data for powerful automated data analysis and interpretation pipelines. This can be immensely useful to monitor and optimize bioprocesses involving mixed communities.

 

Learning Objectives