Formation of cross-shaped Escherichia coli

This paper describes preliminary results of a method to regulate the shapes of a single bacterial cell by confining the cell into a micro chamber. The cell wall of Escherichia coli determines the rod-shape (0.5 μm in width, 2 μm in length) of the bacteria and protects from outer stress. We removed its cell wall by enzyme treatment and confined the cell into cross-shaped microchambers formed on the surface of 2% agar contained the growth media. We believe that our method could contribute to the comprehensive understanding of the shape regulation mechanism of E. coli. This paper focuses on the fabrication of cross-shaped microchambers formed on agar and confinement of the bacteria into the microchambers.