Contact: Lily Whiteman
lwhitema@nsf.gov
703-292-8310
National Science Foundation

Microscopic

Caption: Swimming helps bacteria look for food, escape bad conditions and disperse their genes. But when a bacterium needs to stop swimming, it produces a free-floating clutch (a protein shown in red), that sits down on a gear-like ring (orange), moving that gear away from the engine that spins the bacterium's flagellum. By disengaging the engine from the flagellum's other moving parts, the flagellum's tail is no longer driven to spin.

Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

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Related news release: Microscopic 'clutch' puts flagellum in neutral