Hydrodynamic Interactions, Hidden Order, and Emergent Collective Behavior in an Active Bacterial Suspension.

Spontaneous self-organization (clustering) in magnetically oriented bacteria arises from attractive pairwise hydrodynamics, which are directly determined through experiment and corroborated by a simple analytical model. Lossless compression algorithms are used to identify the onset of many-body self-organization as a function of experimental tuning parameters. Cluster growth is governed by the interplay between hydrodynamic attraction and magnetic dipole repulsion, leading to logarithmic time dependence of the cluster size. The dynamics of these complex, far-from-equilibrium structures are relevant to broader phenomena in condensed matter, statistical mechanics, and biology.

Tuning bacterial hydrodynamics with magnetic fields.

Magnetotactic bacteria are a group of motile prokaryotes that synthesize chains of lipid-bound, magnetic nanoparticles called magnetosomes. This study exploits their innate magnetism to investigate previously unexplored facets of bacterial hydrodynamics at surfaces. Through use of weak, uniform, external magnetic fields and local, micromagnetic surface patterns, the relative strength of hydrodynamic, magnetic, and flagellar force components is tuned through magnetic control of the bacteria's orientation. The resulting swimming behaviors provide a means to experimentally determine hydrodynamic parameters and offer a high degree of control over large numbers of living microscopic entities. The implications of this controlled motion for studies of bacterial motility near surfaces and for micro- and nanotechnology are discussed.

The archaeon Sulfolobus solfataricus contains a membrane-associated protein kinase activity that preferentially phosphorylates threonine residues in vitro.

The extreme acidothermophilic archaeon Sulfolobus solfataricus harbors a membrane-associated protein kinase activity. Its solubilization and stabilization required detergents, suggesting that this activity resides within an integral membrane protein. The archaeal protein kinase utilized purine nucleotides as phosphoryl donors in vitro. A noticeable preference for nucleotide triphosphates over nucleotide diphosphates and for adenyl nucleotides over the corresponding guanyl ones was observed. The molecular mass of the solubilized, partially purified enzyme was estimated to be approximately 125 kDa by gel filtration chromatography. Catalytic activity resided in a polypeptide with an apparent molecular mass of approximately 67 kDa by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Challenges with several exogenous substrates revealed the protein kinase to be relatively selective. Only casein, histone H4, reduced carboxyamidomethylated and maleylated lysozyme, and a peptide modeled after myosin light chains (KKRAARATSNVFA) were phosphorylated to appreciable levels in vitro. All of the aforementioned substrates were phosphorylated on threonine residues, while histone H4 was phosphorylated on serine as well. Substitution of serine for the phosphoacceptor threonine in the myosin light chain peptide produced a noticeably inferior substrate. The protein kinase underwent autophosphorylation on threonine and was relatively insensitive to a set of known inhibitors of "eukaryotic" protein kinases.