We have developed a microfluidic device that enables to analyse by microscopy the interactions between a pathogenic bacterium and a cell to understand what happens when a bacterium infects a cell, is the host cell killed? How long does it take? Can the host cell sometimes kill the infecting bacterium? Do the bacteria replicate inside the host cell? To this end, we acquired sequence of images in phase contrast and in fluorescence microscopy to record the bacterial infection. The goal of the project is to design image-analysis algorithms to quantify the bacteria (fluorescent) that enter in the cell (phase contrast). The algorithms will be implemented in Java as an ImageJ plugin.
Collaboration with Matthieu Delincé, Laboratory of Microbiology and Microsystems, EPFL