Nature Communications (May 2018)
Frequent pauses in Escherichia coli flagella elongation revealed by single cell real-time fluorescence imaging
Abstract
The bacterial flagellar filament is assembled from tens of thousands of flagellin subunits that are exported by a dedicated secretion system. Here, the authors show that, on average, the growth rate of flagella in E. coli decays as flagella lengthen, with large variations due to frequent pauses.