Chemical probes have been instrumental in microbiology since its birth as a discipline in the 19th century when chemical dyes were used to visualize structural features of bacterial cells for the first time. In this review article we will illustrate the evolving design of chemical probes in modern chemical biology and their diverse applications in bacterial imaging and phenotypic analysis. We will introduce and discuss a variety of different probe types including fluorogenic substrates and activity-based probes that visualize metabolic and specific enzyme activities, metabolic labeling strategies to visualize structural features of bacterial cells, antibiotic-based probes as well as fluorescent conjugates to probe biomolecular uptake pathways.
Keywords: activity-based probe; antibiotic conjugate; bacterial imaging; bacterial uptake; fluorogenic substrate; metabolic labeling; phenotypic heterogeneity.