Wavelengths of Bacterial Flagella

Abstract

SUMMARY:In sunlight dark-ground microscopy the flagella of a packet of motile sarcina appear as a smooth tail. The tails often stiffen into helices of two different wavelengths, one being twice as long as the other. The short and the long wavelengths are identical in Sarcina ureae and S. agilis. This phenomenon of two wavelengths, one twice as long as the other, was also found, though less frequently, in certain other bacteria. Otherwise the wavelengths of the flagella of these bacteria appeared specific.

Individual behavior and pairwise interactions between microswimmers in anisotropic liquid

“…In contrast, if a bacterium becomes temporally non-motile, flagellainduced disturbances of director are much weaker to be detected by the polariziation microscopy (see Movie 1 in [26]). The period of this structure is defined by the pitch of a flagella bundle and according to our measurements is about d = 2.2 ± 0.2 µm, which agrees with fluorescent measurements [27,28]. Here we monitored the rate of flagella rotation by measuring a frequency of light intensity alternation at a fixed distance from a bacterium tail (see [16] for details).…”

The Cytology of Pseudomonas spp. as Revealed by a Silver-Plating Staining Method

“…From the results of the present work it is concluded that in Pseudomonas, even under the reasonably standardized conditions used here, differences in flagella wavelength and amplitude are not sufficiently constant to be a useful character for subgeneric classification, This conclusion may be criticized, as indeed the suggestions of Leifson and his colleagues have been criticized (Pijper & Abraham, 1954; Pijper, Neser & Abraham, 1956), on the grounds that stained pictures of flagella are artefacts because flagella wavelength is affected by varying environmental factors (e.g. temperature, pH value, colloid content of the medium, drying), which are not constant during the flagella-staining procedure.…”

Flagellation as a criterion for the classification of bacteria.

“…29,1965 on September 29, 2020 by guest http://mmbr.asm.org/ Downloaded from with a wavelength of 1.1 ai, if the pH value of the medium was changed from 8.0 to 6.0; another strain showed no such effect. They too [compare with Pijper et al (108,109)] found Salmonella Wichita substrains with flagella of long or short wavelengths, and also pictured one cell bearing both types, or even a single flagellum with segments of different curvatures (see p. 115 of the Atlas for illustrations). Nevertheless, provided that sufficiently large numbers of flagella were measured, Leifson et al concluded that the mean wavelength and amplitude was significant for a strain, although different strains of a species showed different values; the mean value for a genus, in fact, included 95.0% of the strains, even in the Proteus-Providence group in which this characteristic was "exceptionally mutable."…”

“…Many further measurements of wavelengths and amplitudes of flagella on living cells were published by Pijper et al (108,109) from photographs of cells which had been slowed down in a viscous mounting medium. They concluded that under standard conditions every strain appeared to have a constant wavelength, but that this was not correlated with any other known character.…”