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How the Motility Pattern of Bacteria Affects Their Dispersal and Chemotaxis
Most bacteria at certain stages of their life cycle are able to move actively; they can swim in a liquid or crawl on various surfaces. A typical path of the moving cell often resembles the trajectory of a random walk. However, bacteria are capable of modifying their apparently random motion in respo...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2013
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3876982/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24391710 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0081936 |
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author | Taktikos, Johannes Stark, Holger Zaburdaev, Vasily |
author_facet | Taktikos, Johannes Stark, Holger Zaburdaev, Vasily |
author_sort | Taktikos, Johannes |
collection | PubMed |
description | Most bacteria at certain stages of their life cycle are able to move actively; they can swim in a liquid or crawl on various surfaces. A typical path of the moving cell often resembles the trajectory of a random walk. However, bacteria are capable of modifying their apparently random motion in response to changing environmental conditions. As a result, bacteria can migrate towards the source of nutrients or away from harmful chemicals. Surprisingly, many bacterial species that were studied have several distinct motility patterns, which can be theoretically modeled by a unifying random walk approach. We use this approach to quantify the process of cell dispersal in a homogeneous environment and show how the bacterial drift velocity towards the source of attracting chemicals is affected by the motility pattern of the bacteria. Our results open up the possibility of accessing additional information about the intrinsic response of the cells using macroscopic observations of bacteria moving in inhomogeneous environments. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3876982 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2013 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-38769822014-01-03 How the Motility Pattern of Bacteria Affects Their Dispersal and Chemotaxis Taktikos, Johannes Stark, Holger Zaburdaev, Vasily PLoS One Research Article Most bacteria at certain stages of their life cycle are able to move actively; they can swim in a liquid or crawl on various surfaces. A typical path of the moving cell often resembles the trajectory of a random walk. However, bacteria are capable of modifying their apparently random motion in response to changing environmental conditions. As a result, bacteria can migrate towards the source of nutrients or away from harmful chemicals. Surprisingly, many bacterial species that were studied have several distinct motility patterns, which can be theoretically modeled by a unifying random walk approach. We use this approach to quantify the process of cell dispersal in a homogeneous environment and show how the bacterial drift velocity towards the source of attracting chemicals is affected by the motility pattern of the bacteria. Our results open up the possibility of accessing additional information about the intrinsic response of the cells using macroscopic observations of bacteria moving in inhomogeneous environments. Public Library of Science 2013-12-31 /pmc/articles/PMC3876982/ /pubmed/24391710 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0081936 Text en © 2013 Taktikos et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Taktikos, Johannes Stark, Holger Zaburdaev, Vasily How the Motility Pattern of Bacteria Affects Their Dispersal and Chemotaxis |
title | How the Motility Pattern of Bacteria Affects Their Dispersal and Chemotaxis |
title_full | How the Motility Pattern of Bacteria Affects Their Dispersal and Chemotaxis |
title_fullStr | How the Motility Pattern of Bacteria Affects Their Dispersal and Chemotaxis |
title_full_unstemmed | How the Motility Pattern of Bacteria Affects Their Dispersal and Chemotaxis |
title_short | How the Motility Pattern of Bacteria Affects Their Dispersal and Chemotaxis |
title_sort | how the motility pattern of bacteria affects their dispersal and chemotaxis |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3876982/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24391710 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0081936 |
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