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Batman Bacteria Use Grappling Hooks to Strategically Mess You Up

Bacteria move about in uncounted ways, but one of the most common forms of cellular locomotion boils down to little more than wildly flailing appendages and other such flagella. Researchers at UCLA have been working with bacteria that utilize tiny...

Bacteria move about in uncounted ways, but one of the most common forms of cellular locomotion boils down to little more than wildly flailing appendages and other such flagella. Researchers at UCLA have been working with bacteria that utilize tiny hair-like structures, called type IV pili (TFP), to cruise about in a distinctive jolting manner. That team, led by bioengineering professor Gerard Wong, have recently discovered that those bacteria use their appendages like grappling hooks, shooting themselves around like mini unicellular ninjas.

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“TFP act like Batman’s grappling hooks,” Wong said in a UCLA release. “These grappling hooks can extend and bind to a surface and retract and pull the cell along.”

As hilariously terrifying as bacteria that slingshot themselves from point one place to another may be, an individual bacterium scooting about isn’t particularly worrisome. However, when thousands or millions aggregate to form biofilms, they can cause harm. In fact, Wong’s team worked with Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a biofilm-forming pathogen that is one of the perpetrators of deadly infections seen in cystic fibrosis patients.

Biofilms form when groups of bacteria, or other microorganisms, adhere themselves to a surface, such as plaque forming on your teeth. As opposed to their mobile counterparts, bacteria in biofilms grow faster and are much harder to remove, such as in sterilization of medical equipment. Also, with all the organisms attached to each other in a smooth sheen, antimicrobial medical treatments are much less effective because they can’t find an opening.

With that in mind, studying how bacteria move is key to both preventing the formation of biofilms and limiting their growth. With high-speed cameras and a custom algorithm for tracking the cells, Wong’s team found that P. aeruginosa cells regularly used their grappling hooks to fling themselves into speed bursts up to 20 times faster than their cruising pace. This led to a discovery that the bacteria had found a way to move quickly through the normally-sticky secretions used as anchors in biofilm formation.

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“If you look at the surfaces the bacteria have to move on, they are usually covered in goop. Bacterial cells secrete polysaccharides on surfaces, which are kind of like molasses,” Wong said. “Because these polysaccharides are long polymer molecules that can get entangled, these are very viscous and can potentially impede movement. However, if you move very fast in these polymer fluids, the viscosity becomes much lower compared to when you’re moving slowly. The fluid will then seem more like water than molasses. This kind of phenomenon is well known to chemical engineers and physicists.”

The benefits of the research are two-fold. First, more understanding of bacteria motility during biofilm formation may prove helpful in preventing their growth, key because removal is quite difficult. Secondly, Wong believes that because bacteria have such individualized motor appendages, refining his team’s process for easily tracking bacterial movement may provide a way to quickly identify individual species.

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