Fast-swimming bacteria that live at the bottom of salt marshes spontaneously come together to form organized crystalline structures that move through water.
The bacterium Thiovulum majus is a large, round cell with hundreds of small flagella, or tail-like structures, that spin to propel the organism. Alexander Petroff of the Rockefeller University in New York and his colleagues observed the behaviour of individually spinning cells under a microscope and found that each created tornado-like flows in the liquid around them. These forces cause the cells to self-assemble into groups of between 10 and 1,000 cells, arranged in a two-dimensional crystalline hexagonal shape that rotates collectively.
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Bacteria swim to form crystals. Nature 520, 588 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/520588c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/520588c