Bacteria change their swimming patterns based on their environment
Bacteria change their swimming patterns based on their environment lead image
When bacteria enter the human body, they rarely stay in one place for long. They travel through the bloodstream, into and through urinary tracts, and they form biofilms with other cells. Understanding how bacteria move and behave in these environments is crucial, but tracking and collecting data on individual bacteria is extremely difficult.
Kim et al. studied bacterial motility using a numerical approach, measuring how their bacterial model adapted to the effects of walls, surfaces, and shear forces.
“We studied the hydrodynamic interaction between bacteria and ambient conditions that lead to different swimming patterns: near-wall entrapment, downstream, and upstream motilities,” said author Yongsam Kim. “Our three-dimensional computational model of swimming bacteria allows us to explore systematically how ambient conditions modify cell movement and reveal significant features.”
The researchers examined bacterial motility in three different conditions: near a rigid surface, both with and without shear flow, and near a wall placed perpendicular to that surface with shear flow present. Each condition altered the behavior of the model bacterium, with the rate of shear flow having a significant effect.
The team hopes their study will result in a greater understanding of bacterial motility in the human body. They are planning to study the behavior of bacterial cells in more sophisticated environments.
“We plan to investigate the upstream motility of bacteria in a more realistic setting, in which the bacterium is enclosed by blood vessels or urinary tracts,” said Kim. “We will develop a mathematical model of a bacterium that swims inside a circular tube representing blood vessels or urinary tracts and explore wall effects on bacterial motility.”
Source: “Effects of swimming environment on bacterial motility,” by Dokyum Kim, Yongsam Kim, and Sookkyung Lim, Physics of Fluids (2022). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0082768 .
