小柯机器人

美国明尼苏达大学Xiang Cheng、北京师范大学Xinliang Xu等研究人员合作发现，复杂液体的胶体性质可增强细菌的运动能力。这一研究成果于2022年3月30日发表在国际学术期刊《自然》上。

Author: Kamdar, Shashank, Shin, Seunghwan, Leishangthem, Premkumar, Francis, Lorraine F., Xu, Xinliang, Cheng, Xiang

Issue&Volume: 2022-03-30

Abstract: The natural habitats of microorganisms in the human microbiome, ocean and soil ecosystems are full of colloids and macromolecules. Such environments exhibit non-Newtonian flow properties, drastically affecting the locomotion of microorganisms1,2,3,4,5. Although the low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics of swimming flagellated bacteria in simple Newtonian fluids has been well developed6,7,8,9, our understanding of bacterial motility in complex non-Newtonian fluids is less mature10,11. Even after six decades of research, fundamental questions about the nature and origin of bacterial motility enhancement in polymer solutions are still under debate12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23. Here we show that flagellated bacteria in dilute colloidal suspensions display quantitatively similar motile behaviours to those in dilute polymer solutions, in particular a universal particle-size-dependent motility enhancement up to 80% accompanied by a strong suppression of bacterial wobbling18,24. By virtue of the hard-sphere nature of colloids, whose size and volume fraction we vary across experiments, our results shed light on the long-standing controversy over bacterial motility enhancement in complex fluids and suggest that polymer dynamics may not be essential for capturing the phenomenon12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23. A physical model that incorporates the colloidal nature of complex fluids quantitatively explains bacterial wobbling dynamics and mobility enhancement in both colloidal and polymeric fluids. Our findings contribute to the understanding of motile behaviours of bacteria in complex fluids, which are relevant for a wide range of microbiological processes25 and for engineering bacterial swimming in complex environments26,27.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04509-3

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04509-3

Nature：《自然》，创刊于1869年。隶属于施普林格·自然出版集团，最新IF：69.504
官方网址：http://www.nature.com/
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