A field guide to bacterial swarming motility

By D. Kearns. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 2010

1,401 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How bacteria regulate, assemble and rotate flagella to swim in liquid media is reasonably well understood. Much less is known about how some bacteria use flagella to move over the tops of solid surfaces in a form of movement called swarming. The focus of bacteriology is changing from planktonic to surface environments, and so interest in swarming motility is on the rise. Here, I review the requirements that define swarming motility in diverse bacterial model systems, including an increase in the number of flagella per cell, the secretion of a surfactant to reduce surface tension and allow spreading, and movement in multicellular groups rather than as individuals.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b51837ffd7fb7c9a21cab4ff2984fcdaae3410e6

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Citations in the corpus

Active Brownian particles (2012, background): “Bacteria, for example, can exhibit different motility types to propel themselves under different environmental conditions [105,186].”
Beyond Risk: Bacterial Biofilms and Their Regulating Approaches (2020, background): “Various species of bacteria exhibit both type of movements to navigate bacterial cells toward a favorable environment and to attach onto a surface (Kearns, 2010; Hintsche et al., 2017).”
Physics of microswimmers—single particle motion and collective behavior: a review (2014, background): “In assemblies of motile microorganisms, cooperativity reaches a new level as they exhibit highly organized movements with remarkable large-scale patterns such as 33 networks, complex vortices, or swarms (Gachelin et al., 2014; Heinrichsen, 1978; Kearns, 2010; Wensink et al., 2012).”
Meso-scale turbulence in living fluids (2012, background): “In view of the various physical and chemical pathways through which bacteria may communicate (1, 11, 28), a basic yet unsolved problem is to identify those interactions that are responsible for the emergence of collective behavior in dense suspensions (2, 29, 30).”
Tuned, driven, and active soft matter (2015, background): “bacteria crawling or gliding on a substrate [19, 21, 374, 484, 495].”
A phase diagram for bacterial swarming (2019, background): “The transition to swarming involves several critical intra-cellular processes such as an increase in flagellar number and changes in cell shape, suggesting these changes promote favorable swarming conditions [Harshey 2003; Kearns 2010; Tuson 2013; Mukherjee 2015; Be’er 2019].”