Transient locking of the hook procures enhanced motility to flagellated bacteria
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Flagellated bacteria often proliferate in inhomogeneous environments, such as biofilms, swarms and soil. In such media, bacteria are observed to move efficiently only if they can get out of "dead ends" by changing drastically their swimming direction, and even to completely reverse it. Even though these reorientations are ubiquitous, we have only recently begun to describe and understand how they happen. In the present work, we visualized the flagella of bacteria swimming in a soft agar solution. The surprising observation that the filaments do not rotate while being flipped from one side of the cell to the other suggests that reversals are driven directly by the motor rather than by the thrust created by the rotating filament. This was confirmed by observing bacteria in a liquid crystal, where the linear movement of bacteria greatly simplifies the analysis. These observations suggest that the reversal and reorientation processes involve a temporary locking of the flagellum's hook, which is the normally flexible joint between the rotary motor and the long helical filament that propels the cell. This newly described locked-hook mode occurs only when the motor switches to a clockwise rotation. That correlates with other phenomena that are triggered by a switch in one direction and not the other.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it