Chemical Screening for Single Bacterial Activity Using Bacteria Immobilization into Microporous

In this paper we demonstrate chemical screening using a microbial micro reactor immobilizing microbes by dielectrophoresis into micro holes, as shown in Fig.1. The flow-type microbial micro reactor facilitates collecting and evaluating reaction products while immobilization of microbes enables quantification of the number of microbes involved in the reaction and making their reactions conditions consistent. We applied this system to investigate the effects of chemicals on microbial activities of Corynebacterium glutamicum, which is widely used to produce beneficial chemicals in industry. The proposed system will be of great help to reduce the time and cost to find optimum biochemical microbial reactions.