I’m excited to share our high-throughput single-cell isolation of Bifidobacterium work in “Microbiome Interactions in Health and Disease” conference organised in Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK!
#microbiome26
Thanks for the support from @niranjantw.bsky.social and @jsgounot.bsky.social ! Also, thanks Lamhai Ha and the rest of the team for the efforts!
5. Using this approach, we obtained >600 cultures from fecal samples of five individuals in Singapore, representing >20 unique Bifidobacterium lineages, >60% of which are novel relative to publicly available genomes.
4. BSM-MUP is the most effective growth medium for isolating Bifidobacterium, outperforming other tested media and strongly limiting the growth of unwanted bacteria such as Enterococcus.
3. The best time to isolate bacteria depends on the species. We found that different Bifidobacterium species are most successfully cultured at different time points, highlighting the importance of sampling complex fecal communities at multiple times to capture more diversity.
2. Global diversity of the mock community is preserved in post-dispensing cultures. When we dispensed a mixed community of nine species during their active growth phase, all species were still represented in the final culture, even though their relative proportions changed.
Key highlights:
1. The B.SIGHT single-cell dispenser is highly precise, with only about 11% of microwells containing more than one cell, as measured using fluorescence signals. This means most bacteria are isolated one cell at a time.
Thrilled to share our high-throughput Bifidobacterium isolation work in Microbiology Spectrum! journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
By integrating a single-cell dispenser into a culturomics workflow, we accelerated the isolation of individual bacterial cells, allowing robust strain-level resolution.
