Coupled magnetic nanoparticle‐mediated isolation and single‐cell image recognition to detect Bacillus' cell size in soil

Abstract

Microbial morphology fundamentally constrains how species interact with their environment, and hence ultimately affects their niche. However, the methodology of functional microbes in the soil ecosystem is still poorly studied since it is difficult to capture and identify the active monospecific community from the complicated environment and enormous number of microbial species in soils. To comprehensively reveal the morphology of active microbes in soil ecosystem, magnetic nanoparticle-mediated isolation (MMI) and single-cell image recognition (SCIR) were employed to study soil active Bacillus community, which functionally boosted the soil fertility in organic fertilisation compared to mineral fertilisation and unfertilised control treatments in our previous study. The results showed that

Editorial for special issue on “Recent innovations in soil physical, chemical and biological analysis” (2nd National Symposium on soil analysis)

“…Body size, as one of the essential microbial traits, can be more important than diversity with regard to the influence of the environment and ecosystem. Rong et al (2022) combined several novel techniques, including magnetic nanoparticle‐mediated isolation (MMI) and single‐cell image recognition (SCIR), to investigate the body sizes of Bacillus , the keystone species in agroecosystems. They found that MMI can successfully isolate Bacillus from soil microbial communities and coupled with SCIR can detect the change in their body size in response to different fertilisation strategies.…”