CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Chemotaxis has a meaningful role in several fields, such as microbial physiology, medicine and biotechnology. This work presents a new application of dynamic laser speckle (or biospeckle) to detect different degrees of bacterial motility during chemotactic response experiments. Encouraging results showed different bacterial dynamic responses due to differences in the hardness of the support in the swarming plates. We compare this method with a conventional technique that uses white light. Both methods showed to be analogous and in some cases complementary. The results suggest that biospeckle processed images can be used as an alternative method to evaluate bacterial chemotactic response and can supply additional information about the bacterial motility in different areas of the swarm plate assay that might be useful for biological analysis.