Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 11, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15711-0
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- European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union [834615]
- European Research Council (ERC) [834615] Funding Source: European Research Council (ERC)
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Living organisms often display adaptive strategies that allow them to move efficiently even in strong confinement. With one single degree of freedom, the angle of a rotating bundle of flagella, bacteria provide one of the simplest examples of locomotion in the living world. Here we show that a purely physical mechanism, depending on a hydrodynamic stability condition, is responsible for a confinement induced transition between two swimming states in E. coli. While in large channels bacteria always crash onto confining walls, when the cross section falls below a threshold, they leave the walls to move swiftly on a stable swimming trajectory along the channel axis. We investigate this phenomenon for individual cells that are guided through a sequence of micro-fabricated tunnels of decreasing cross section. Our results challenge current theoretical predictions and suggest effective design principles for microrobots by showing that motility based on helical propellers provides a robust swimming strategy for exploring narrow spaces. Most biological and artificial self-propelled particles tend to be attracted by solid walls on their swimming pathways. Vizsnyiczai et al. show that, unexpectedly, confining E. coli cells inside a channel triggers stable locomotion along the channel axis once the channel is narrower than a critical value.
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