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Swimming trajectories of bacteria can be altered by environmental conditions, such as background flow and physical barriers, that limit the free swimming of bacteria. We present a comprehensive model of a bacterium that consists of a rod-shaped cell body and a flagellum which is composed of a motor, a hook, and a filament. The elastic flagellum is modeled based on the Kirchhoff rod theory, the cell body is considered to be a rigid body, and the hydrodynamic interaction of a bacterium near a wall is described by regularized Stokeslet formulation combined with the image system. We consider three environmental conditions: (1) a rigid surface is placed horizontally and there is no shear flow, (2) a shear fluid flow is present and the bacterium is near the rigid surface, and (3) while the bacterium is near the rigid surface and is under shear flow, an additional sidewall which is perpendicular to the rigid surface is placed. Each environmental state modifies the swimming behavior. For the first condition, there are two modes of motility, trap and escape, whether the bacterium stays near the surface or moves away from the surface as we vary the physical and geometrical properties of the model bacterium. For the second condition, there exists a threshold of shear rate that classifies the motion into two types of paths in which the bacterium takes either a periodic coil trajectory or a linear trajectory. For the last condition, the bacterium takes upstream motility along the sidewall for lower shear rates and downstream motility for larger shear flow rates.
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Acoustic trap-and-release for rapid assessment of cell motility
Functional cilia and flagella are crucial to the propulsion of physiological fluids, motile cells, and microorganisms. Motility assessment of individual cells allows discrimination of normal from dysfunctional behavior, but cell-scale analysis of individual trajectories to represent a population is laborious and impractical for clinical, industrial, and even research applications. We introduce an assay that quantifies swimming capability as a function of the variation in polar moment of inertia of cells released from an acoustic trap. Acoustic confinement eliminates the need to trace discrete trajectories and enables automated analysis of hundreds of cells in minutes. The approach closely approximates the average speed estimated from the mean squared displacement of individual cells for wild-type Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and two mutants ( ida3 and oda5 ) that display aberrant swimming behaviors. Large-population acoustic trap-and-release rapidly differentiates these cell types based on intrinsic motility, which provides a highly sensitive and efficient alternative to conventional particle tracing.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1633971
- PAR ID:
- 10104493
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Soft Matter
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 21
- ISSN:
- 1744-683X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 4266 to 4275
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1039/c9sm00184k
