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Trajectory of a model bacterium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2017

Akanksha Thawani  and
Mahesh S. Tirumkudulu Open the ORCID record for Mahesh S. Tirumkudulu [Opens in a new window]
Akanksha Thawani
Affiliation:
Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076, India
Mahesh S. Tirumkudulu*
Affiliation:
Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076, India
*
†Email address for correspondence: mahesh@che.iitb.ac.in
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Abstract

It is well known that bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, propel themselves in aqueous media by rotating helically shaped flagella. While a number of theoretical approaches have been proposed to model the detailed swimming motion, a rigorous comparison with experimental data is lacking due to the difficulty in simultaneously visualizing the motion of the head and the flagella along with the resulting trajectory. To this end, we have built a macroscopic working model of a bacterium and visualized its detailed motion in high-viscosity liquid. We show that a small asymmetry in the mass distribution in the head can lead to helical trajectories with large pitch and radius, which are reminiscent of the wiggling trajectories observed for swimming bacteria. The detailed motion agrees well with the predictions from slender-body theory that accounts for the asymmetric mass distribution in the head. Our study shows that the trajectory consists of two helical trajectories of different length scales – a large one caused by the asymmetric mass distribution and set by the head rotation rate, and a smaller one caused by the rotating flagellum and set by its rotation rate. We discuss implications of these results on the wiggling trajectories of swimming bacteria.

JFM classification

Biological Fluid Dynamics: Micro-organism dynamics Biological Fluid Dynamics: Propulsion Biological Fluid Dynamics: Swimming/flying
Type
JFM Papers
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 835 , 25 January 2018 , pp. 252 - 270
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Copyright
© 2017 Cambridge University Press 

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Footnotes

‡

Present address: Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.

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Thawani et al. supplementary movie

Model bacterium was constructed and its motion was observed in low Reynolds number regime as described in the main text. The motion was imaged away from the tank walls at 125 frames per second. Scale bar: 20 mm.

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