Quantifying the Benefit of a Dedicated "Magnetoskeleton" in Bacterial Magnetotaxis by Live-Cell Motility Tracking and Soft Agar Swimming Assay.

ABSTRACT: The alphaproteobacterium Magnetospirillum gryphiswaldense has the intriguing ability to navigate within magnetic fields, a behavior named magnetotaxis, governed by the formation of magnetosomes, intracellular membrane-enveloped crystals of magnetite. Magnetosomes are aligned in chains along the cell's motility axis by a dedicated multipart cytoskeleton ("magnetoskeleton"); however, precise estimates of its significance for magnetotaxis have not been reported. Here, we estimated the alignment of strains deficient in various magnetoskeletal constituents by live-cell motility tracking within defined magnetic fields ranging from 50 μT (reflecting the geomagnetic field) up to 400 μT. Motility tracking revealed that ΔmamY and ΔmamK strains (which assemble mispositioned and fragmented chains, res

SUBMITTER: Pfeiffer D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6974628 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature