Transient locking of the hook procures enhanced motility to flagellated bacteria.

ABSTRACT: Flagellated bacteria often proliferate in inhomogeneous environments, such as biofilms, swarms and soil. In such media, bacteria are observed to move efficiently only if they can get out of "dead ends" by changing drastically their swimming direction, and even to completely reverse it. Even though these reorientations are ubiquitous, we have only recently begun to describe and understand how they happen. In the present work, we visualized the flagella of bacteria swimming in a soft agar solution. The surprising observation that the filaments do not rotate while being flipped from one side of the cell to the other suggests that reversals are driven directly by the motor rather than by the thrust created by the rotating filament. This was confirmed by observing bacteria in a liquid crystal,

SUBMITTER: Duchesne I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5703839 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature