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Volume 170, Issue 2

Twists and turns: 40 years of investigating how and why bacteria swim Open Access

Abstract

Fifty years of research has transformed our understanding of bacterial movement from one of description, based on a limited number of electron micrographs and some low-magnification studies of cells moving towards or away from chemical effectors, to probably the best understood behavioural system in biology. We have a molecular understanding of how bacteria sense and respond to changes in their environment and detailed structural insights into the workings of one of the most complex motor structures we know of. Thanks to advances in genomics we also understand how, through evolution, different species have tuned and adapted a core shared system to optimize behaviour in their specific environment. In this review, I will highlight some of the unexpected findings we made during my over 40-year career, how those findings changed some of our understanding of bacterial behaviour and biochemistry and some of the battles to have those observations accepted.

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Keyword(s): chemotaxis , memoir , motility , Rhodobacter and swimming
© 2024 The Authors
  • This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. This article was made open access via a Publish and Read agreement between the Microbiology Society and the corresponding author’s institution.
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2024-02-16
2024-05-20
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Twists and turns: 40 years of investigating how and why bacteria swim
Microbiology 170, 001432 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.001432
/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001432
/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001432
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