Rules of the road: the navigational 'strategies' of bacteria in motion

Bacteria that move around live on the edge. All the time. Their success, be it in finding nutrients, fending off predators or multiplying depends on how efficiently they navigate through their confining microscopic habitats. Whether these habitats are in animal or plant tissues, in waste, or in other materials. In a recent paper published in PNAS, a team of researchers led by McGill University, has described a number of factors affecting how five, very different, species of bacteria search and navigate through varied microfluidic environments which pose various decisional challenges. This increased understanding of the bacterial space searching and navigational 'strategies' has implications for everything from diagnosing infectious diseases and maintaining human health, to the development of devices for everything from genomics to bio computation, as well as for a wide range of agricultural, industrial, and environmental activities.

The researchers filmed the movements of five species of bacteria navigating through a range of microfluidic settings - from fairly open spaces (plazas) to complicated meandering channels. This allowed them to better understand the factors involved in the navigational 'strategies' of bacteria as they search for available space.

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