- Jan 7, 2002
- 12,755
- 3
- 0
Pound-for-pound, it's the strongest organism ever. This mighty beast is the gonorrhea bacterium ? the strongest creature alive.
These tiny creatures can pull with a force equal to 100,000 times their body weight ? as though a human could drag 10 million kilos.
Many bacteria produce filaments called pili. These are a hundred times as long as they are wide and up to ten times longer than the bacterium itself. They can also contract. Scientists knew that Neisseria gonorhoeae bacteria use "type four" pili to crawl along a surface and to attach to cells and infect them.
What they didn't know was that these bacteria can bundle pili together to exert long, strong pulls. Michael Sheetz and colleagues at Columbia University in New York put the bacteria in a field of tiny gel "pillars" and measured the amount the bacteria could bend them as a way of measuring the force of their pull.
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...-hmts&nsref=news7_head
These tiny creatures can pull with a force equal to 100,000 times their body weight ? as though a human could drag 10 million kilos.
Many bacteria produce filaments called pili. These are a hundred times as long as they are wide and up to ten times longer than the bacterium itself. They can also contract. Scientists knew that Neisseria gonorhoeae bacteria use "type four" pili to crawl along a surface and to attach to cells and infect them.
What they didn't know was that these bacteria can bundle pili together to exert long, strong pulls. Michael Sheetz and colleagues at Columbia University in New York put the bacteria in a field of tiny gel "pillars" and measured the amount the bacteria could bend them as a way of measuring the force of their pull.
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...-hmts&nsref=news7_head
Facebook
Twitter