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Emergence of Escherichia coli critically buckled motile helices under stress.
- Source :
-
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America . 12/18/2018, Vol. 115 Issue 51, p12979-12984. 6p. - Publication Year :
- 2018
-
Abstract
- Bacteria under external stress can reveal unexpected emergent phenotypes. We show that the intensely studied bacterium Escherichia coli can transform into long, highly motile helical filaments poized at a torsional buckling criticality when exposed to minimum inhibitory concentrations of several antibiotics. While the highly motile helices are physically either right- or left-handed, the motile helices always rotate with a right-handed angular velocity →, which points in the same direction as the translational velocity ~vT of the helix. Furthermore, these helical cells do not swim by a "run and tumble" but rather synchronously flip their spin → and thus translational velocity--backing up rather than tumbling. By increasing the translational persistence length, these dynamics give rise to an effective diffusion coefficient up to 20 times that of a normal E. coli cell. Finally, we propose an evolutionary mechanism for this phenotype's emergence whereby the increased effective diffusivity provides a fitness advantage in allowing filamentous cells to more readily escape regions of high external stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- *PHENOTYPES
*ESCHERICHIA coli
*ANTIBIOTICS
*BACTERIOPHAGES
*MICROBIOLOGY
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00278424
- Volume :
- 115
- Issue :
- 51
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 133660345
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1809374115