Swimming faster despite obstacles: a universal mechanism behind bacterial speed enhancement in complex fluids

Authors:
Shashank Kamdar1 and Xiang Cheng1

doi: 10.15698/mic2022.07.781
Volume 9, pp. 139 to 140, published 04/07/2022.

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Affiliations:

1 Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.

Keywords: 

Bacterial motility, complex fluids, fluid mechanics, Escherichia coli, colloids

Corresponding Author(s):

Shashank Kamdar, Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. kamda008@umn.edu Xiang Cheng, Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. xcheng@umn.edu

Conflict of interest statement:

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Please cite this article as:

Shashank Kamdar and Xiang Cheng (2022). Swimming faster despite obstacles: a universal mechanism behind bacterial speed enhancement in complex fluids. Microbial Cell: 9(7): 139-140. doi: 10.15698/mic2022.07.781

© 2022 Kamdar and Cheng. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.

Abstract:

Bacteria constitute about 15% of global biomass and their natural environments often contain polymers and colloids, which show complex flow properties. It is crucial to study their motion in such environments to understand their growth and spreading as well as to design synthetic microswimmers for biomedical applications. Bacterial motion in complex viscous environments, although extensively studied over the past six decades, still remains poorly understood. In our recent study combining experimental data and theoretical analysis, we found a surprising similarity between bacterial motion in dilute colloidal suspensions and polymer solutions, which challenged the established view on the role of polymer dynamics on bacterial speed enhancement. We subsequently developed a physical model that provides a universal mechanism explaining bacterial speed enhancement in complex fluids.