Figure 1

Sculpting living cells with defined widths. (a) Schematic of the ‘sandwich’ microchannel chip. The chip is composed of two coverslips (top and bottom: light gray), an agarose pad supplemented with nutrients (middle: light yellow), and a PDMS layer with microchannels (middle: light blue). The enlarged section is the top view of microchannels with various widths. (b) Bright and fluorescence field merged time-lapse images of three representative cells growing in microchannels with specific widths, HU-mCherry labeled nucleoid (red). From top to bottom, the widths of microchannel are 1.4 μm, 2.0 μm, and 2.6 μm, respectively. The time intervals for three images series are 2 min, 4 min, and 4 min, respectively.