Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 9: Posters - Cell Mechanics
BP 9.8: Poster
Monday, March 20, 2017, 17:30–19:30, P3
Effect of the flexural rigidity of type IV pili on the motility of N. gonorrhoeae bacteria. — •Maxim A. Beliaev1, Wolfram Pönisch1, Nicolas Biais2, and Vasily Zaburdaev1 — 1Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany — 2Brooklyn College, New York, USA
Gonorrhea is the second most common sexually transmitted disease in the world. Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria, the causative agent of the gonorrhea infection, use multiple long and semiflexible filaments, called type IV pili to move, attach to the epithelium and form colonies. These filaments assemble and elongate from the cell membrane towards its environment where they can attach to various substrates and pili of other cells. The retraction of pili can generate significant pulling forces of up to 180 pN. Although currently there exist several models of pili driven motility, they do not consider the semiflexible nature of pili filaments. In this work we explicitly analyze the effect of pili flexural rigidity on the motility of N. gonorrhoeae bacteria. We use two approaches to model pili. In the first one, a pilus is modelled as an Euler-Bernoulli cantilever beam with a point load at the tip whereas in the second approach, a pilus is modelled as a stiff rod connected to the cell membrane by a pivotal spring. For both models we compare the results of the numerical simulations of the moving cell to the experimental data and analyze how the flexibility of pili affects the cell persistence and orientation during motility.