Effects of shear-thinning viscosity and viscoelastic stresses on flagellated bacteria motility

The behavior of flagellated bacteria swimming in non-Newtonian media remains an area with contradictory and conflicting results. We report on the behavior of wild-type and smooth-swimming E. coli in Newtonian, shear-thinning, and viscoelastic media, measuring their trajectories and swimming speed using a three-dimensional real-time tracking microscope. We conclude that the speed enhancement in Methocel solution at higher concentrations is due to shear thinning and an analytical model is used to support our experimental result. We argue that shear-induced normal stresses reduce wobbling behavior during cell swimming but do not significantly affect swimming speed. However, the normal stresses play an important role in decreasing the flagellar bundling time, which changes the swimming-speed distribution. A dimensionless number, the strangulation number (Str) is proposed and used to characterize this effect.