At the indicated times about 105 cells were collected by centrifugation (5,000 × g for 10 min). At least 1 mL of the cell-free culture fluid was saved, Selleck FG-4592 air-saturated and stored on ice until use. The cell pellet was resuspended in a small volume of the corresponding culture fluid. Propidium iodide (5 mM, dissolved in phosphate-buffered saline) was added to 20 μL of this cell suspension to stain dead cells (red fluorescence), and the suspension
was immediately transferred onto a coverslip and incubated in the dark for 20 min to allow cells to adhere. All coverslips were pretreated with poly L-lysine (0.05 g*L-1) to fix the cells on the surface. Subsequently, cells were washed twice with the corresponding air-saturated culture fluid directly
on the coverslip to remove non-adherent cells. Phase contrast and fluorescence images were taken at room temperature using a customized inverted Leica DMI 6000 B microscope, an oil-immersion objective and a high-sensitivity iXON CCD camera (Andor). Fluorescence microscopy was performed using the bandpass filters BP546/12 (red) and BP470/40 (green) and the emission filters 605/75 find more (red) and 525/50 (green). Luminescent cells were identified by bioluminescence microscopy without any filter in a Pecon flow chamber to ensure sufficient oxygen supply [3]. The exposure time for imaging of luminescent cells with the cooled (-80°C) CCD camera was set to 240 s. Phase-contrast, bioluminescence and/or fluorescence images were obtained from the same fields of view. Single cell analysis Images were analyzed using ImageJ 1.37c (National Institute of Health http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij). A screen depicting the contours of the cells was created from the phase contrast image using the self-programmed PlugIn CellEvaluator (Prof.
Dr. J. Rädler, LMU Munich). This screen was superimposed on the background-corrected fluorescence and bioluminescence images. Intensities were determined for each cell and normalized by cell size. The correlation coefficient r is defined as the covariance of two variables (here fluorescence and luminescence) divided by the product of their standard deviations. A value of |r| = 1 indicates 100% correlation. The p-value is a measure of the probability that the correlation is due to chance. selleck chemicals llc Time-lapse histograms were selleck compound generated using Matplotlib (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net). Acknowledgments This work was financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Exc114/1) and (Ju270/9-1) and the BMBF (ChemBiofilm). We are indebted to Joachim Rädler for access to the PlugIn CellEvaluator and to Judith Mergerle and Georg Fritz for instruction in its use. We are grateful to Kolja Prothmann for assistance in preparing the illustrations using Matplotlib and to Laure Plener for helpful discussions during the preparation of the manuscript. References 1. Chai Y, Chu F, Kolter R, Losick R: Bistability and biofilm formation in Bacillus subtilis. Mol Microbiol 2008, 67:254–263.