The paper mill keeps churning, excited to announce the second publication from my time at Tufts University with Prof. Jeffrey Guasto in eLife! This was work led by Michael Stehnach, a PhD student at the time at Tufts University, and now a postdoc at Brandeis University.

Many microbes are capable of exploring their environment by navigating up/down chemical gradients in a process called chemotaxis. This is especially important in the oceans, where the ability to find ephemeral food sources in an otherwise sparse landscape is a crucial fitness advantage. One of the limiting factors in studying chemotaxis has been the sheer scale of the problem – how do you rapidly screen a large range of chemicals at different concentrations for different organisms at both the single cell and population levels?

In this paper, we developed a new microfluidic platform to tackle this problem. Called the “Multiplexed Chemotaxis Device”, or MCD, this two-layer design takes a single chemical input, splits this stream into five sequentially diluted solutions, then produces a total of six chemotaxis experiments simultaneously. In doing so, this reduces biological variability as all conditions are imaged simultaneously with the same cell suspension, ensures consistent dilutions, and above increases experimental throughput by almost an order of magnitude compared to conventional microfluidic chips.

For a broad summary of the paper and our journey through its technological developed, see our plain-text eLife Digest attached with the main manuscript. eLife is a journal that prides itself on transparency, so if you’re interested in “peering” behind the peer review curtain, the decision letter and peer reviews are publically available!

As a note, this paper was published as part of eLifes “old format”, with the conventional peer review process. To read more about the recent changes they are bringing in to attempt to combat the restricted access to science, see here.