Escherichia coli

…in response to sensory perception of Escherichia coli, t

Macromolecular protein complexes perform essential biological functions across life forms. A fundamental, though yet unsolved question in biology is how the function of such complexes is regulated by intracellular or extracellular signals. For instance, we have little understanding of how forces affect multi-protein machines whose function is often mechanical in nature. We address this question by studying the bacterial flagellar motor, a large complex that powers swimming motility in many bacteria. This rotary motor autonomously adapts to changes in mechanical load by adding or removing force

…of an endogenous gene in individual Escherichia coli bacteria. When interpreted using a theoretical model for mRNA dynamics, the single-cell data allowed us to obtain the probabilistic rates of promoter switching, transcription initiation and