Frequent pauses in Escherichia coli flagella elongation revealed by single cell real-time fluorescence imaging

Nature Communications
Ziyi ZhaoFan Bai

Abstract

The bacterial flagellum is a large extracellular protein organelle that extrudes from the cell surface. The flagellar filament is assembled from tens of thousands of flagellin subunits that are exported through the flagellar type III secretion system. Here, we measure the growth of Escherichia coli flagella in real time and find that, although the growth rate displays large variations at similar lengths, it decays on average as flagella lengthen. By tracking single flagella, we show that the large variations in growth rate occur as a result of frequent pauses. Furthermore, different flagella on the same cell show variable growth rates with correlation. Our observations are consistent with an injection-diffusion model, and we propose that an insufficient cytoplasmic flagellin supply is responsible for the pauses in flagellar growth in E. coli.

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Citations

Sep 16, 2018·Nature Reviews. Microbiology·Valentine Lagage, Stephan Uphoff
Sep 5, 2019·Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology·Chadwick HillmanPatricia A Rosa
Jun 15, 2019·The Analyst·Imesha W De SilvaGuido F Verbeck
Oct 20, 2019·Scientific Reports·Thorsten B BlumJan Pieter Abrahams
Oct 30, 2020·Molecules : a Journal of Synthetic Chemistry and Natural Product Chemistry·Jonathan HiraChristian S Lentz
Oct 30, 2020·Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews : MMBR·Alexander Cambré, Abram Aertsen
Nov 14, 2020·Biomolecules·Xiang-Yu Zhuang, Chien-Jung Lo
Feb 13, 2021·Biomolecules·Manuel Halte, Marc Erhardt

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
confocal microscopy
fluorescence imaging
super-resolution microscopy
PCR
Illumination Microscopy

Software Mentioned

ImageJ
MATLAB
Volocity 3D Image Analysis

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