2021 年 61 巻 5 号 p. 316-320
Swimming bacteria display distinct motile patterns to explore their favorable environments, driven by bacterial flagella. A typical example of the flagellar motility is the run-tumble swimming in Escherichia coli: the CCW rotation of a flagellar bundle propels a cell forward. The cell undergoes reorientation (tumbling) upon the switching of flagellar rotation from CCW to CW. It has been characterized using chemotactic mutants for motility studies; however, the original E. coli strain’s motility mode remains unclear. In this review, we characterized the original E. coli K-12 strain’s forward and backward swimming based on the single-molecular techniques.
