ABOVE: Pseudomonas aeruginosa
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The paper
L. Talà et al., “Pseudomonas aeruginosa orchestrates twitching motility by sequential control of type IV pili movements,” Nat Microbiol, 4:774–80, 2019.
Bacteria use long, threadlike attachments known as pili to interact with their environments. In some microorganisms, a specific form of the filaments called type IV pili also enable locomotion.
The molecular motors powering type IV pili are some of the strongest found in nature, generating large forces to retract the filaments from a surface, says Alexandre Persat, a biophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. “We were wondering how this is coordinated—whether these pili are used for motility in a random way, or if they synchronize the activity of their motors.”
Type IV pili movements are rapid, making them tough to see with traditional microscopes. So Persat and his colleagues used interferometric scattering microscopy (iSCAT), a technique recently developed ...
