Pattern engineering of living bacterial colonies using meniscus-driven fluidic channels

TL;DR

This paper introduces MeniFluidics, a simple and effective fluidic technique for patterning living bacterial colonies with high resolution, enabling advanced bioengineering and fundamental microbial research.

Contribution

The authors develop MeniFluidics, a novel, low-cost method for precise patterning of bacterial biofilms and studying microbial collective behavior.

Findings

Achieved multiscale patterning with submillimetre resolution.

Controlled anisotropic bacterial colony expansion.

Studied collective phenomena in confined bacterial swarming.

Abstract

Engineering spatially organized biofilms for creating adaptive and sustainable biomaterials is a forthcoming mission of synthetic biology. Existing technologies of patterning biofilm materials suffer limitations associated with the high technical barrier and the requirements of special equipment. Here we present controlled meniscus-driven fluidics, MeniFluidics; an easily implementable technique for patterning living bacterial populations. We demonstrate multiscale patterning of living-colony and biofilm formation with submillimetre resolution. Relying on fast bacterial spreading in liquid channels, MeniFluidics allows controlled anisotropic bacterial colonies expansion both in space and time. The technique has also been applied for studying collective phenomena in confined bacterial swarming and organizing different fluorescently labelled Bacillus subtilis strains into a converged pattern. We believe that the robustness and low technical barrier of MeniFluidics offer a tool for developing living functional materials, bioengineering and bio-art, and adding to fundamental research of microbial interactions.