ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Flagellated bacterial motility in polymer solutions.
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 63 papers.
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Who cites it
63 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cell-body curvature reduces stall frequency to enhance Vibrio cholerae swimming and chemotaxis through hydrogels.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Directional motion of a self-steering active intruder in a dense crowd of cognitive active agents.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Elasticity promotes directional transport ofSoft matter · 2026Article
- Cell-body curvature modulates stall frequency to enhancebioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Spatial self-organization of confined bacterial suspensions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The intestinal environment potentiates bacteriophage adaptation in response to phenotypic resistance inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Species-specific surface dwell times and accumulation of microbes investigated by holographic microscopy.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2025Article
- Motile and Chemotactic Minicells and Minicell-Driven Biohybrids Engineered for Active Cargo Delivery.ACS applied materials & interfaces · 2025Article
- RABiTPy: an open-source Python software for rapid, AI-powered bacterial tracking and analysis.BMC bioinformatics · 2025Article
- Physics of swimming and its fitness cost determine strategies of bacterial investment in flagellar motility.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Decoding Bacterial Motility: From Swimming States to Patterns and Chemotactic Strategies.Biomolecules · 2025Review
- Morphogenesis of bacterial cables in polymeric environments.Science advances · 2025Article
- Unravel the rotational and translational behavior of a single squirmer in flexible polymer solutions at different Reynolds numbers.Communications physics · 2025Article
- Enhancement of bacterial rheotaxis in non-Newtonian fluids.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Physical mechanism reveals bacterial slowdown above a critical number of flagella.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Article
- The surface interface and swimming motility influence surface-sensing responses inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Article
- Chiral active particles are sensitive reporters to environmental geometry.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Viscosity-dependent determinants ofmBio · 2024Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
It is widely believed that the swimming speed, v, of many flagellated bacteria is a nonmonotonic function of the concentration, c, of high-molecular-weight linear polymers in aqueous solution, showing peaked v(c) curves. Pores in the polymer solution were suggested as the explanation. Quantifying this picture led to a theory that predicted peaked v(c) curves. Using high-throughput methods for characterizing motility, we measured v and the angular frequency of cell body rotation, Ω, of motile Escherichia coli as a function of polymer concentration in polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) and Ficoll solutions of different molecular weights. We find that nonmonotonic v(c) curves are typically due to low-molecular-weight impurities. After purification by dialysis, the measured v(c) and Ω(c) relations for all but the highest-molecular-weight PVP can be described in detail by Newtonian hydrodynamics. There is clear evidence for non-Newtonian effects in the highest-molecular-weight PVP solution. Calculations suggest that this is due to the fast-rotating flagella seeing a lower viscosity than the cell body, so that flagella can be seen as nano-rheometers for probing the non-Newtonian behavior of high polymer solutions on a molecular scale.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.