Fig. 4: Thermal responsive cell morphologies changes from rod to spheres or to fibers.

a Construct for controlling cell morphology. The expression of two morphology related genes, mreB and ftsZ, enabling formations of sphere- and fiber-shape cells, respectively, were controlled by the T-switch system. b Confocal imaging of cells harboring 145+221 constructs cultured at constant temperature, 30 °C, 33 °C and 35 °C, scale bar = 10 μm. c Quantitative measurements of cell lengths by imageJ from at least 9 images from part b containing over 150 captured cells manually. d Bifunctional dynamic control of cell morphology among shapes of spheres (mreB overexpressing), rods (normal cell type) and fibers (ftsZ overexpressing) were on-line recorded in a microfluidics with a scale bar of 2 μm. Sample sizes of collected cells of each time point varied significantly depending on the growth phase, 3–10 cells at 1 h, 10–40 cells at 3 h, and 100–240 cells at 5 h. All data in c and d are displayed in Box-plot: a value of median, quantiles, mini- and maxi-mum. One-way ANOVA with Tukey-Kramer test was used in c and d. p value: N.S. not significant; *p < 0.0332; **p < 0.0021; ***p < 0.0002; and ****p < 0.0001.