Cell aspect ratio important for bacterial rheotaxis

Abstract

When placed in flows with local shear, flagellated bacteria commonly display reorientations towards the local vorticity direction, a chirality-induced rheotactic behavior of great importance for many biological functions. As the observed reorientational dynamics arises from the interplay between the Jeffery dynamics controlled by the cell aspect ratio and the chirality-induced reorientation controlled by the chiral strength, in this work we quantitatively study how cell aspect ratio can become a key factor in tuning the reorientational dynamics, through numerical and theoretical analysis. Our results reveal that, for sphere-like bacteria the rheotactic behavior sensitively depends on the cell aspect ratio and totally disappears in the limiting case with cell aspect ratio being 1, in very good agreement with our predicted analytic functional form. For needle-like bacteria with cell aspect ratio much larger than 1, the rheotactic behavior becomes insensitive to cell aspect ratio, in agreement with previous experimental observations.