Entrapment of Living Bacterial Cells in Low-Concentration Silica Materials Preserves Cell Division and Promoter Regulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The entrapment of bacterial cells within inorganic silica materials was reported almost 20 years ago. However, almost all studies to date have shown that these entrapped cells are unable to divide and thus should be expected to have reduced promoter activity. In view of the importance of bacteria as model systems for both fundamental and applied biological studies, it is crucial that immobilized cells retain solutionlike properties, including the ability to divide and display normal promoter activity. Herein we report on a method to immobilize bacterial cells within low-density inorganic silica-based materials, where the cells retain both cell division and promoter activity. Sol–gel processing was used to entrap Escherichia coli cells carrying a variety of green fluorescent protein-linked promoters into sodium silicate-derived materials that were formed in microwell plates. Using a series of assays, we were able to demonstrate that (1) the entrapped cells can divide within the pores of the silica matrix, (2) cellular pathways are regulated in a similar manner in both solution and the sol–gel-derived materials, and (3) promoters in entrapped cells can be specifically induced with small molecules (e.g., antimicrobial compounds) in a concentration-dependent manner to allow assessment of both potency and mode of action. This solid-phase assay system was tested using multiple antimicrobial pathways and should enable the development of solid-phase assays for the discovery of new small molecules that are active against bacteria.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".