Nature Communications (May 2018)

Frequent pauses in Escherichia coli flagella elongation revealed by single cell real-time fluorescence imaging

  • Ziyi Zhao,
  • Yifan Zhao,
  • Xiang-Yu Zhuang,
  • Wei-Chang Lo,
  • Matthew A. B. Baker,
  • Chien-Jung Lo,
  • Fan Bai

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04288-4
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9, no. 1
pp. 1 – 10

Abstract

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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.