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Saturday, February 4, 2012

Oriented imaging of 3D subcellular structures in bacterial cells using optical tweezers

G. Carmon, I. Fishov, and M. Feingold
Using oscillating optical tweezers, we show that controlled alignment of rod-shaped bacterial cells allows imaging fluorescently labeled three-dimensional (3D) subcellular structures from different, optimized viewpoints. To illustrate our method, we analyze the Z ring of E. coli. We obtain that the radial width of the Z ring in unconstricted cells is about 120 nm. This result suggests that the Z ring consists of an extremely sparse network of FtsZ filaments.

DOI

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