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Updated: May 5, 2026

Engineering Adherent Bacteria by Creating a Single Synthetic Curli Operon
Published on: November 16, 2012
Characterization and Control of the Run-and-Tumble Dynamics of Escherichia Coli
Christina Kurzthaler1,2,3,4, Yongfeng Zhao5,6,7,8, Nan Zhou9
1Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, 01187 Dresden, Germany.
Abstract:
We characterize the full spatiotemporal gait of populations of swimming Escherichia coli using renewal processes to analyze the measurements of intermediate scattering functions. This allows us to demonstrate quantitatively how the persistence length of an engineered strain can be controlled by a chemical inducer and to report a controlled transition from perpetual tumbling to smooth swimming. For wild-type E. coli, we measure simultaneously the microscopic motility parameters and the large-scale effective diffusivity, hence quantitatively bridging for the first time small-scale directed swimming and macroscopic diffusion.
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