Exploring bacterial swarm development through smart microscopy

The introduction of novel, rapid methods of microscopy has enabled researchers to capture large amounts of data in a short amount of time, however the tradeoff between spatial resolution, time resolution and potential damage to biological samples from laser exposure remains unsolved. This creates the necessity of approaches to not only acquire large datasets, but smart datasets, in the sense that imaging is limited to only capture the most relevant and necessary information. Such a smart microscopy setup can be achieved for example by coupling image analysis to the microscope control, allowing on-the-fly adjustments of experimental settings such as imaging sites or exposure time. We followed this approach to create a fully automated microscope setup that adaptively performs experiments without the need for manual intervention. Here, I will describe how we take advantage of this system to investigate biological and biophysical processes in a developing bacterial swarm, following its changes as the community expands over several orders of magnitude in space.