Cell Grower : High-throughput measurements of microbial growths

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Monitoring microbial cell growth is central to many fields of research, including systems biology, genomics, evolution, microbial ecology, enzyme kinetics and crystallography as well as the study of bacterial and fungal pathogens. With the increase in throughput in all the fields of life-sciences, a single experiment typically requires the monitoring of tens to hundreds of bacterial or fungal strains. We request funds to acquire a microbial growth monitoring platform that allows to follow the growth of up to 4,600 populations simultaneously in shaking or still liquid cultures and across the wide-range of temperatures encountered by typical model microbes (5C to 40C). The instrument is fully automated and allows to read culture optical densities continuously and in real-time over periods of hours to days. This allow to measure three parameters that are key to microbial population dynamics: lag-phase, division time and achieved biomass. The instrument will be key to 8 research teams that are performing cutting edge research in the fields described above. The instrument will be used to directly train 9 research associates, 16 postdoctoral fellows, 31 graduate students and 5 undergraduate students whose projects rely in the monitoring of microbial cell growth. The instrument will be installed at the Institut de Biologie Intégrative et des Systèmes of Université Laval where it will be made available to more than 20 laboratories and more than 100 highly qualified personnel from undergraduate students to senior postdoctoral fellows and research associates. The instrument will be a great opportunity to train the next generation of biologists on the design and analysis of large-scale experiments, which are skills that are increasingly in demand throughout the life-sciences.