Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6.5.
Mechanisms for the various gliding motilities of bacteria. (1) Pili motil-
ity, (2) Slime motility, (3)
Flavobacterium
motility, and (4)
Mycoplasma
gliding are
schematically presented. Reprinted from [30]. (Copyright 2005 Kyoritsu Shuppan.)
28% acceleration of speed.
M. mobile
is a pathogen isolated from the gills of a
fresh water fish [9, 10, 39, 40, 41]; thus, this response may help to prevent the
organism from being swept out of the gills. The change in the gliding direction
could also be explained by physical mechanisms, specifically the subcellular
position of the adhesion protein (see Section 6.4.2) [42, 43, 27] and the fact
that gliding always occurs in the direction of the head. The head of the
My-
coplasma
may be turned around by the force of the liquid flow, resulting in
upstream movement. This phenomenon can be observed more clearly by at-
taching a bead to the tail of a
Mycoplasma
placed in a liquid flow [44]. Simple
physical explanations, however, cannot account for the acceleration seen [5].
Cytadherence of
Mycoplasmas
, linked to gliding motility, is well-known
to be involved in parasiticity and pathogenicity [16, 1]. When a
Mycoplasma
strain loses cytadherence, it is easily removed from the tissue by the host an-
imal. It is less clear how gliding affects or contributes to pathogenicity. Many
Mycoplasmas
confirmed for gliding motility are pathogenic [4, 1, 39, 40, 41].
