High-speed motility originates from cooperatively pushing and pulling flagella bundles in bilophotrichous bacteria.
Published version
Peer-reviewed
Repository URI
Repository DOI
Type
Change log
Authors
Abstract
Bacteria propel and change direction by rotating long, helical filaments, called flagella. The number of flagella, their arrangement on the cell body and their sense of rotation hypothetically determine the locomotion characteristics of a species. The movement of the most rapid microorganisms has in particular remained unexplored because of additional experimental limitations. We show that magnetotactic cocci with two flagella bundles on one pole swim faster than 500 µm·s-1 along a double helical path, making them one of the fastest natural microswimmers. We additionally reveal that the cells reorient in less than 5 ms, an order of magnitude faster than reported so far for any other bacteria. Using hydrodynamic modeling, we demonstrate that a mode where a pushing and a pulling bundle cooperate is the only possibility to enable both helical tracks and fast reorientations. The advantage of sheathed flagella bundles is the high rigidity, making high swimming speeds possible.
Description
Funder: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft; FundRef: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100004189
Funder: IMPRS on Multiscale Biosystems
Funder: French National Research Agency; FundRef: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001665; Grant(s): ANR Tremplin-ERC: ANR-16-TERC-0025-01
Keywords
Journal Title
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
2050-084X
Volume Title
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Sponsorship
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (KL 818/2-2)
Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (57314018)
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 937 (A21))
Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-16-TERC-0025-01)