High-throughput, single-cell-encoded colony imaging reveals infection-linked heterogeneity

HeteroTyper enables automated, high-throughput single-colony imaging across >100 plates per run, resolving infection-linked heterogeneity in Yersinia pseudotuberculosis via appearance-time distributions.

• Why it matters: Colony-level quantification of phenotypic heterogeneity is hard to scale, especially on dark or selective media, limiting measurements tied to adaptation and infection dynamics.
• What they did: The platform uses time-lapse plate imaging plus a ready-to-use computational pipeline to extract appearance times (as a proxy for lag), growth trajectories, colony size, intensity, and morphology from routine image series. Automated colony counts closely matched manual counts.
• The result: In vitro, early and late phases show broader appearance-time distributions than mid-log phases, and in vivo mesenteric lymph node isolates show the broadest distributions versus spleen and liver; appearance time is negatively associated with final colony size and intensity.

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