Laurence G. Wilson
Senior Lecturer - Physics
University of York
At the Rowland, the Wilson Lab was interested in understanding bacterial motility, particularly relating to the formation and propagation of biofilms. Most studies had focused either on macroscopic phenomena (for example, the size of colonies growing on agar plates) or on microscopic, single cell measurements. Their work focused on the behavior of E. coli, using newly developed image processing algorithms to assess motility in much larger groups of individuals (typically around 10,000 at a time) than previously possible. They used high-throughput Fourier-space techniques, allowing the study of motility over a range of length scales from 1 micrometer to 1 millimeter, and timescales from one millisecond to several hours.