Figure 8
From: A novel time-lapse imaging method for studying developing bacterial biofilms
An example of quantitative biofilm image analysis. (A) Six images of developing B. subtilis biofilm (strain 108) gathered by bright field stereomicroscopy with episcopic illumination. We extracted these six images from three-day time-lapse video (replicate No. 2, Supplementary Video 10). The developmental timepoints of these images correspond to the timepoints that we marked as morphology-relevant for the strain 108 in Fig. 7B. (B) 4D scatterplot generated in BiofilmQ—a software for quantitative biofilm analysis and visualization29. We first pre-processed and segmented six biofilm images in BiofilmQ (see Methods) and then depicted the spatial position of the resulting squares (pseudo-cells) and their corresponding light intensity values (arbitrary unit). Under assumption that square-specific light intensity reflects biofilm thickness at a particular spatial position, it is clear that after one day of biofilm development the center of the biofilm is increasingly getting thinner (deep blue color), while a belt shaped region located close to the outer biofilm edge becomes the thickest part (bright yellow color).
