Elucidating bacteriophage dynamics and interactions with real-time label-free optical imaging

Abstract Bacteriophages are the focus of extensive research, and monitoring their dynamics and interactions with bacterial hosts is crucial to characterize the mechanisms of infection and to support potential applications in biotechnology and medicine. Traditional monitoring techniques rely on the fluorescent labelling of bacteriophages due to their size being nanometric. In this paper, we propose a novel, label-free method to generate optical signatures of bacteriophages in a conventional micro