title: Nanofabricated structures and microfluidic devices for bacteria: from techniques to biology.
abstract: Nanofabricated structures and microfluidic technologies are increasingly being used to study bacteria because of their precise spatial and temporal control. They have facilitated studying many long-standing questions regarding growth, chemotaxis and cell-fate switching, and opened up new areas such as probing the effect of boundary geometries on the subcellular structure and social behavior of bacteria. We review the use of nano/microfabricated structures that spatially separate bacteria for quantitative analyses and that provide topological constraints on their growth and chemical communications. These approaches are becoming modular and broadly applicable, and show a strong potential for dissecting the complex life of bacteria at various scales and engineering synthetic microbial societies.
authors.affiliation: Delft University of Technology, Department of Bionanoscience, Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft, Lorentzweg 1, 2628CJ Delft, The Netherlands. c.dekker@tudelft.nl.
authors.forename: Fabai
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Cees
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Dekker
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000302:isolation & purification*; D046210:Microfluidic Analytical Techniques; D049329:Nanostructures / Q000737:chemistry*