By peering through a high-tech microscope at flash-frozen proteins, researchers have just solved a 50-year-old mystery of how bacteria, and their ancient foe, archaea, actually swim.
They saw that in the bacteria, the protein filaments could exist in 11 different states, and 10 different states in the archaea. It's having a mix of these states that causes the structure as a whole to curl into its coiled shape in both microbes, despite differences in protein structure.
The resulting supercoiled structure is so stable it can withstand torsion stresses, retaining its curled shape while being spun – that is, until the flagellum changes spin direction.straight swimming involves counter-clockwise rotation. But when the bacteria switch the spin direction of their tail, the forces imposed on the flagella alter its structure, screwing one or more of their filaments out of their tight bundling and loosening the supercoils into a semi-coiled or curly shape.
These direction-induced changes were not seen in the archaea, although changing their environmental conditions by adding salt or acid did alter their flagella's structure. Despite their differences in structure and that they evolved independently, nature has shaped both bacteria and archaea's flagella to essentially have the same form and function – a neat example of"As with birds, bats, and bees, which have all independently evolved wings for flying, the evolution of bacteria and archaea has converged on a similar solution for swimming in both,""Our new understanding will help pave the way for technologies that could be based upon such...
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