Abstract
Spirochetes are bacteria distinguished by an undulate or helical cell body and intracellular flagellar called periplasmic flagella or endoflagella. Spirochetes translate by rotating the cell body. In this chapter, we show a method for simultaneous measurement of the cell body rotation and swimming speed in individual spirochete cells. We also describe a simple chemotaxis assay capable of observing the response of spirochete in real time under a microscope and quantitatively evaluating the response magnitude to attractants and repellents.
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Acknowledgment
We thank N. Koizumi and K. Takabe for technical support. This work was partly supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas “Harmonized Supramolecular Motility Machinery and Its Diversity” to S.N. (JP25117501), Research Foundation for Opto-Science and Technology to S.N.
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Nakamura, S., Islam, M.S. (2017). Motility of Spirochetes. In: Minamino, T., Namba, K. (eds) The Bacterial Flagellum. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1593. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6927-2_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6927-2_19
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Publisher Name: Humana Press, New York, NY
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