Slimfield microscopy: Image analysis

Cell bodies and apparent EzrA rings were segmented as outlined previously (Wollman et al., 2016). In brief, the cell body was found by segmenting both a five frame average EzrA-meYFP fluorescence and brightfield image using a threshold set by the background peak in the pixel intensity distribution. The brightfield segmentation was used as seeds for watershedding the segmented fluorescence image to identify individual cells. Further thresholding within cell pixels yields a mask for the EzrA ring.

Diffraction-limited fluorescent foci were tracked using custom Matlab software as described previously (Wollman et al., 2015). In brief, in each frame, candidate foci are identified by thresholding top-hat transformed images using Otsu’s method. The spot centre is determined to sub-pixel precision using iterative Gaussian masking (Leake et al., 2006) and accepted if its signal-to-noise ratio, as defined by the foci intensity, the background-corrected integrated pixel intensity within a five pixel radius circular region of interest centred of the foci intensity centroid, divided by the standard deviation of the background pixels, is greater than 0.4. Foci are linked into the same track between image frames if they are within a distance of 1 optical resolution width (approximately five pixels), generating single particle tracks to a typical localization precision of ~40 nm (Llorente-Garcia et al., 2014).

The mean squared displacement of each track over its first four time interval points was used to calculate its microdiffusion coefficient, D, using a linear fit (Kusumi et al., 1993). These were binned into 0.01 μm² s⁻¹ bins and fitted with 1–3 gamma functions (Stracy et al., 2015), with three gammas generating the lowest reduced chi².

Copy number values were calculated using a deconvolution method called CoPro (Wollman and Leake, 2015) which utilised the symmetrical geometry of S. aureus cells and the in vivo characteristic intensity of single meYFP molecules (Leake, 2014). Detection of single meYFP was confirmed by observation of single, distinct photobleach steps. This characteristic brightness value corresponding to a single meYFP molecule was determined as the peak of the intensity distribution of fluorescent foci found after 200 ms of photobleaching, and was equivalent to 2000 ± 500 counts on our EMCCD camera detector.