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Swimming polarity inversion in uncultured magnetotactic cocci

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Abstract

Magnetotactic bacteria are microorganisms that produce intracellular magnetic nanoparticles organized in chains, conferring a magnetic moment to the bacterial body that allows it to swim following the geomagnetic field lines. Magnetotactic bacteria usually display two swimming polarities in environmental samples: the South-seeking (SS) polarity and the North-seeking (NS) polarity, characterized by the bacteria swimming antiparallel or parallel to the magnetic field lines, respectively. It has been observed that in the presence of inhomogeneous magnetic fields, NS magnetotactic bacteria can change their swimming polarity to SS or vice versa. The present study analyzes populations of NS cocci obtained from SS cocci isolated in the presence of a magnet. The aim was to study differences in the swimming characteristics and magnetic moment among both populations of cocci. For that, trajectories were recorded and the velocity and angle among the velocity and the applied magnetic field were calculated. In addition, micrographs from both SS and NS cocci were obtained and their magnetosomes were measured to analyze their length, width, aspect ratio and magnetic moment, to finally obtain the magnetic moment for each coccus. The results showed the following properties of NS relative to SS cocci: higher velocities, narrow bacterial magnetic moment distribution, higher dispersion in the distribution of angles among the velocity and the applied magnetic field and lower magnetic field sensibility. Those differences cannot be explained by the simple change in magnetic polarity of the magnetosome chain and can be related to the existence of an active magnetoreceptive process in magnetotactic bacteria.

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Funding

Giovanni Angiolillo acknowledges financial support from the “Programa de Capacitacão Institucional”-PCI program of the Brazilian agency Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico – CNPq. Fernanda Abreu acknowledges CNPq, CAPES and FAPERJ funding agencies. We thank the microscopy facilities CENABIO-UFRJ and UniMicro-UFRJ.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas-CBPF, Rua Xavier Sigaud 150, Urca, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 22290-180, Brazil

    Giovanny Angiolillo & Daniel Acosta-Avalos

  2. Instituto de Microbiologia Paulo de Góes, Universidade Federal Do Rio de Janeiro-UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 21941-902, Brazil

    Fernanda Abreu

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  1. Giovanny Angiolillo
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  2. Fernanda Abreu
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  3. Daniel Acosta-Avalos
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Correspondence to Daniel Acosta-Avalos.

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Angiolillo, G., Abreu, F. & Acosta-Avalos, D. Swimming polarity inversion in uncultured magnetotactic cocci. Eur Biophys J 53, 69–76 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00249-023-01698-1

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