Robert Moscaritolo: "Research Reveals How Bacteria Move" - CPES Alumni News
Prof. John Dutcher in the
Department of Physics,
and collaborated with Prof.
Lori Burrows in the
Department of Biochemistry
and Biomedical Sciences
at McMaster University.
Moscaritolo worked with Prof. John Dutcher in the Department of Physics, and collaborated with Prof. Lori Burrows in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University.
Why did the bacteria cross the petri dish? To get to the other side. But how do bacteria get to the other side of the petri dish when they don’t have the appendages to do so? That was the question Robert Moscaritolo, M.Sc. ’13, looked at for his master’s thesis in physics.
“Non-motile bacteria can be transported by motile ones,” says Moscaritolo, describing the phenomenon as “bacterial crowd-surfing.” He studied the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Commonly found on people’s skin and usually harmless, these bacteria tend to infect individuals with compromised immune systems, such as patients undergoing chemotherapy.
Cells of P. aeruginosa move across surfaces using hair-like appendages called type IV pili (T4P), which they extend from their cell walls and attach to a surface. The bacteria then retract these filaments and pull themselves along “like molecular grappling hooks,” says Moscaritolo.
Pathogenic bacteria use pili to move across a surface until they find an ideal location to colonize. He created a time-lapse video that showed how motile cells of P. aeruginosa transported non-motile bacterial cells of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria across an agar surface. “You can imagine the implications this has for the spread of bacterial infections,” he says.
Original article and photo can be found on page 7 of the Winter 2014 CPES Alumni Newsletter.