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Updated: Apr 21, 2026

Biophysical Characterization of Flagellar Motor Functions
Published on: January 18, 2017
Switching dynamics of the bacterial flagellar motor near zero load
Fangbin Wang1, Junhua Yuan2, Howard C Berg3
1Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, 230026, China; and.
Abstract:
Switching dynamics of flagellar motors of Escherichia coli is commonly observed through markers attached to the flagellar filaments. To eliminate possible complications resulting from the conformational transitions of these filaments and to look at the output of motors more directly, we monitored motor rotation by attaching nanogold spheres to the hooks of cells lacking filaments. We observed exponentially distributed counterclockwise (CCW) and clockwise (CW) intervals and Lorentzian power spectra of the switching time series consistent with models that treat motor switching as a two-state Poisson process.
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