ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Bending forces plastically deform growing bacterial cell walls.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 66 papers.
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Who cites it
66 citing papers in PubMed.
- Study of wrap mode impact on Pseudomonas aeruginosa motion in the chemotactic field of fungi.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2026Article
- Micro-compression analysis of biopolymer-producing bacteria usingCell surface (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2026Article
- Different Cell Wall Compositions of ESKAPE Isolates on Glass Surfaces Impact Adhesion Adaptability to Dynamic Shear Stress.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Bacterial cell widening alters periplasmic size and activates envelope stress responses.The EMBO journal · 2025Article
- E. coli filament buckling modulates Min patterning and cell division.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Stress-mediated growth determinesProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- β-Barrel proteins dictate the effect of core oligosaccharide composition on outer membrane mechanics.Biophysical journal · 2025Article
- β-barrel proteins dictate the effect of core oligosaccharide composition on outer membrane mechanics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Homeostasis of cytoplasmic crowding by cell wall fluidization and ribosomal counterions.Research square · 2024Article
- Article
- High-throughput measurement of elastic moduli of microfibers by rope coiling.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Tools and methods for high-throughput single-cell imaging with the mother machine.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Highly parallel bending tests for fungal hyphae enabled by two-photon polymerization of microfluidic mold.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2024Article
- Article
- Cell envelope growth of Gram-negative bacteria proceeds independently of cell wall synthesis.The EMBO journal · 2023Article
- Microfluidic techniques for mechanical measurements of biological samples.Biophysics reviews · 2023Review
- Feedback linking cell envelope stiffness, curvature, and synthesis enables robust rod-shaped bacterial growth.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Bending stiffness ofLab on a chip · 2022Article
- Structural mechanics of filamentous cyanobacteria.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Engineered Living Hydrogels.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2022Review
6 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Cell walls define a cell's shape in bacteria. The walls are rigid to resist large internal pressures, but remarkably plastic to adapt to a wide range of external forces and geometric constraints. Currently, it is unknown how bacteria maintain their shape. In this paper, we develop experimental and theoretical approaches and show that mechanical stresses regulate bacterial cell wall growth. By applying a precisely controllable hydrodynamic force to growing rod-shaped Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis cells, we demonstrate that the cells can exhibit two fundamentally different modes of deformation. The cells behave like elastic rods when subjected to transient forces, but deform plastically when significant cell wall synthesis occurs while the force is applied. The deformed cells always recover their shape. The experimental results are in quantitative agreement with the predictions of the theory of dislocation-mediated growth. In particular, we find that a single dimensionless parameter, which depends on a combination of independently measured physical properties of the cell, can describe the cell's responses under various experimental conditions. These findings provide insight into how living cells robustly maintain their shape under varying physical environments.
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