Scientists call the formation of this shape "supercoiling," and now, after more than 50 years, they understand how bacteria do it. It takes a rotating, corkscrew-like propeller to push a bacterium forward. That's because such shapes can't generate thrust. You might think that such a tail would be straight, or at best a bit flexible, but that would leave the bacteria unable to move. A flagellum is made of thousands of subunits, but all these subunits are exactly the same. "We can show that these models were wrong, and our new understanding will help pave the way for technologies that could be based upon such miniature propellers."ĭifferent bacteria have one or many appendages known as a flagellum, or, in the plural, flagella. "While models have existed for 50 years for how these filaments might form such regular coiled shapes, we have now determined the structure of these filaments in atomic detail," said Egelman, of UVA's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. The researchers used cryo-EM and advanced computer modeling to reveal what no traditional light microscope could see: the strange structure of these propellers at the level of individual atoms. Egelman, PhD, a leader in the field of high-tech cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), has cracked the case. But how exactly they do this has baffled scientists, because the "propellers" are made of a single protein.Īn international team led by UVA's Edward H. Bacteria push themselves forward by coiling long, threadlike appendages into corkscrew shapes that act as makeshift propellers.
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