A team of researchers in a new study demonstrated how bacteria can change behavior to rapidly clear obstacles and reached their food.

The findings have implications for both biology and medicine and can be applied in robotic search and rescue missions.

Bacteria Changes Behavior

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies collaborated and found that the "swim and tumble," the popular move that bacteria use to move toward food or away from poisons, changes when they encounter obstacles.

Ziv Bar-Joseph, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Computational Biology and Machine Learning, noted that bacteria often encounter obstacles in the real world. He mentioned E. coli, which has to navigate the gastrointestinal tract.

However, the researchers explained that previous studies looked at chemotaxis in unobstructed chambers. Chemotaxis refers to the way bacteria move toward a section where food is abundant or away from an area where there is a higher concentration of poison.

For their experiment, they added obstacles for the bacteria. They designed microfluidic chambers that are just about 10 micrometers high, 1 millimeter wide, and 1 millimeter long, and placed square and circular obstacles in them. Existing models have predicted that this will slow down the progress of bacteria. They placed E. coli to test.

They found that the obstacles did not impede the progress of the bacteria.

"Almost regardless of the obstacles, they got to the food almost as quickly as they did without obstacles," shared Sabrina Rashid, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University and the lead author of the study. "The obstacles were not affecting the time they needed to reach food, as the previous models predicted."

She explained that bacteria communicated through secreting chemicals while overcoming the obstacles placed in the microfluidic chambers. However, upon closer look, they also noticed that E. coli changed its behavior as it moves.

Normally, the bacteria move by swimming toward one direction and tumbling to reorient themselves. The researchers found that the E.coli, during the experiment, tumbled less and swam more so it can move faster.

Predicting Bacteria Movement

The researchers believe that their findings could aid in fighting off infections. They have developed their own chemotaxis model that could predict the performance of bacteria.

They also suggested that the model can be applied to simulations of swarms of robots for rescuing trapped victims during emergencies.

"Any type of insight we can get from biology to improve computation is important to us," added Bar-Joseph.