The research group of Professor Takayuki Nishisaka, Dr. Yoshiaki Kinoshita, and Senior Researcher Yoshitomo Kikuchi of the Institute of Industrial Technology, Gakushuin University, Department of Physics, is a research group in which the symbiotic bacterium Burkholderia swims while wrapping flagellar fibers around the body. I discovered a new flagellar movement.
Flagellar movement is essential for bacteria to move in search of a better environment, and two movement patterns, "tumbling movement" such as Escherichia coli and "back-and-forth-backward movement" such as Vibrio parahaemolyticus, are known. Has been done.The research group notes the fact that only the symbiotic bacterium Berkholderia can pass through the constriction between the gastrointestinal tract and the symbiotic organs of the turtle, and non-symbiotic bacteria such as Escherichia coli cannot. Then, I thought, "Isn't Berkholderia having a peculiar movement mechanism?"
Therefore, the research group treated the cell body with a fluorescent dye and visualized the flagellar fibers under a fluorescence microscope.This observation revealed that Burkholderia can swim by rotating the furrow fibers 150 times per second.Furthermore, when we created a sticky environment that imitated the stenotic site, we succeeded in frequently observing how the flagellar fibers swim while wrapping around the cell body.This is a property not found in the known hair movement, and can be said to be the "third form of hair movement".
This flagellar wrapping movement was also observed in the symbiotic bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus of Mimi squid, and it was shown that various symbiotic bacteria may perform the flagellar wrapping movement.
Paper information:[The ISME Journal] Unforeseen swimming and gliding mode of an insect gut symbiont, Burkholderia sp.RPE64, with wrapping of the flagella around its cell body
