EventDetails

Speaker:
Dr. Katja Taute, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

More is different: High-throughput 3D tracking reveals microbial navigation strategies

How microbes navigate their environment has implications that range from health to climate change. We use high-throughput 3D tracking of bacteria to investigate behavioral strategies that drive navigation relative to chemical gradients, chemotaxis. We find that individual E. coli cells differ dramatically in chemotactic performance, reveal the underlying navigation strategies, and show that interplay between hydrodynamics and behavioral strategy can result in an inversion of the direction of chemotaxis.