2010-10-09

Walking Bacteria

Cosmic Log - Bacteria can walk on 'legs'

Alan Boyle writes: Bacteria have legs? That suggestion seemed surprising to Gerard Wong, a bioengineering professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, when his students told him they were seeing some strange behavior in movies of the microbes.

A bacterium can "walk" on a surface while in a vertical orientation, as shown in this schematic.


For directional motion, bacteria generally favor "crawling" in a horizontal orientation, as shown in this schematic.

Videos of walking bacteria, courtesy of Gerard Wong:

Researchers discover 'walking' properties of bacteria

(PhysOrg.com) -- Many drug-resistant infections are the result of bacterial biofilms, structured aggregates of bacteria that live on surfaces and that are extremely resistant to environmental stresses. These biofilms impact human health in many ways -- cystic fibrosis, for example, is a disease in which patients die from airway bacterial biofilm infections that are invulnerable to even the most potent antibiotics.

Now, UCLA researchers and their colleagues have found that during the initial stages of biofilm formation, can actually stand upright and "walk" as part of their adaptation to a surface.

Bacteria Strut Their Stuff - Science News


Researchers had already documented bacteria swimming through liquids or crawling on their bellies across a surface, but no one had ever seen bacteria getting up and walking. No one, that is, until a group of undergraduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign made movies of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria moving on a microscope slide. Working under the supervision of Gerard Wong, a biophysicist now at UCLA, the students adapted a technique used by physicists to track microscopic particles. Computer programs allowed the researchers to quickly sort through video footage of teeming bacteria to find out what individual cells were up to.

Notre Dame researcher helps discover "walking" properties of bacteria // News // Notre Dame News // University of Notre Dame

Talk about a walk on the wild side: University of Notre Dame researcher Joshua Shrout is co-author of a new paper that shows that bacteria are capable of “standing up” and moving while vertical.


UCLA-led research team finds that bacteria can stand up and walk / UCLA Newsroom

Now, UCLA researchers and their colleagues have found that during the initial stages of biofilm formation, bacteria can actually stand upright and "walk" as part of their adaptation to a surface.

Conrad Research Group

Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Houston

Cool Image

Walking motility 

Visualization of vertical "walking" motility mechanism in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a pathogenic bacterium implicated in many infections in immune-compromised patients. While walking, bacteria can cover large areas more efficiently; in additional, vertical orientation helps bacteria detach from surfaces. See Gibiansky, Conrad, Wong, et al., Science (2010) for more information.

Collected from: Conrad Research Group

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