Shedding light on E. coli phototaxis

My thesis work has been focused on phototaxis response in E. coli. I will review the current state of knowledge on chemotaxis and phototaxis and discuss the motivation behind this project in Chapter 1. In Chapters 2 and 3, I will describe a high-throughput framework for studying phototaxis in bacteria, which consists of the experimental setup and automated routine for data analysis, that I have developed over the course of this project. In Chapter 4, I will present experimental results that allowed us to pinpoint the role of individual components of the chemotactic network in phototaxis response and to characterize power dependence of the response. In Chapter 5, I will discuss the role of receptor-receptor interaction in determining the integrated phototactic response. In Chapter 6, I will quantify the effect of light on E. coli swimming velocity and its potential implication. In Chapter 7, I will discuss how various external parameters affect E. coli phototaxis response. Finally, in Chapter 8, I will present some preliminary results and discuss potential future directions of this project