Flow cytometry and cell sorting of heterogeneous microbial populations: the importance of single-cell analyses

作者：Hazel M. Davey, Douglas Bruce Kell · 发表于：Microbiological Reviews · 年份：1996 · DOI：10.1128/mr.60.4.641-696.1996 · 被引用次数：786 · 研究领域：Microfluidic and Bio-sensing Technologies、Biosensors and Analytical Detection、Water Systems and Optimization

The most fundamental questions such as whether a cell is alive, in the sense of being able to divide or to form a colony, may sometimes be very hard to answer, since even axenic microbial cultures are extremely heterogeneous. Analyses that seek to correlate such things as viability, which is a property of an individual cell, with macroscopic measurements of culture variables such as ATP content, respiratory activity, and so on, must inevitably fail. It is therefore necessary to make physiological measurements on individual cells. Flow cytometry is such a technique, which allows one to analyze cells rapidly and individually and permits the quantitative analysis of microbial heterogeneity. It therefore offers many advantages over conventional measurements for both routine and more exploratory analyses of microbial properties. While the technique has been widely applied to the study of mammalian cells, is use in microbiology has until recently been much more limited, largely because of the smaller size of microbes and the consequently smaller optical signals obtainable from them. Since these technical barriers no longer hold, flow cytometry with appropriate stains has been used for the rapid discrimination and identification of microbial cells, for the rapid assessment of viability and of the heterogeneous distributions of a wealth of other more detailed physiological properties, for the analysis of antimicrobial drug-cell interactions, and for the isolation of high-yielding str...