currentsinbiology: Nanoscale images reveal bacteria motor parts in unprecedented detail Many bacteri
currentsinbiology: Nanoscale images reveal bacteria motor parts in unprecedented detail Many bacteria swim using flagella – long tails that are attached to tiny motors made of proteins, just tens of nanometres wide. These motors spin the flagella, which work as nanoscale propellers to drive the bacterium forward. Despite motors in diverse bacteria having the same core structure, different bacteria vary widely in their swimming power. For example, Campylobacter jejuni, which causes food poisoning, can swim powerfully enough to bore through the mucus that lines the gut, an environment too thick and sticky for other bacteria to push through. The reasons for these differences in swimming ability have remained obscure – until now. Using a recently installed high-powered electron microscope at Imperial, a team of researchers lead by Dr Morgan Beeby from the Department of Life Sciences has been able visualize these motors in unprecedented detail. Their visualizations of these motors explains the differences in swimming ability, mathematically accounting for differences in motor power. The work is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Morgan Beeby, Deborah A. Ribardo, Caitlin A. Brennan, Edward G. Ruby, Grant J. Jensen, David R. Hendrixson. Diverse high-torque bacterial flagellar motors assemble wider stator rings using a conserved protein scaffold. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016; 201518952 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1518952113 These are three bacterial motors with different torque (units of torque are piconewton nanmometres, pN nm).Credit: Morgan Beeby/Imperial College London -- source link
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