Bacterial sensory complexes for environmental navigation

Abstract

Many motile bacteria rely on extensive chemoreceptor arrays to sense their chemical environment and control their motility apparatus. This enables the bacteria to follow nutrient gradients by comparing their current condition with that one of the recent past. This system is highly sensitive and can respond to nutrient concentrations over five orders of magnitude. This behaviour is called chemotaxis and enables the cells to seek out favourable environments. Chemotaxis is one of the best understood signal transduction systems in biology, and the structure and function of the chemoreceptor arrays is well understood in the model system of E. coli. Furthermore, chemotaxis is also a key behaviour in the infection process of pathogenic bacteria. New research findings show that chemoreceptor array architecture can differ from the model system of E. coli, and that we find a great variability with regard to other bacterial species.