Bacteria exploit a polymorphic instability of the flagellar filament to escape from traps.

ABSTRACT: Many bacterial species swim by rotating single polar helical flagella. Depending on the direction of rotation, they can swim forward or backward and change directions to move along chemical gradients but also to navigate their obstructed natural environment in soils, sediments, or mucus. When they get stuck, they naturally try to back out, but they can also resort to a radically different flagellar mode, which we discovered here. Using high-speed microscopy, we monitored the swimming behavior of the monopolarly flagellated species Shewanella putrefaciens with fluorescently labeled flagellar filaments at an agarose-glass interface. We show that, when a cell gets stuck, the polar flagellar filament executes a polymorphic change into a spiral-like form that wraps around the cell body i

SUBMITTER: Kuhn MJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5474801 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature