New insights into bacterial behavior from electron cryotomography

Most motile bacterial cells possess a highly sensitive and adaptable sensory system composed of clusters of chemoreceptors. This chemosensory system is used to detect changes in nutrient concentrations, allows the cells to navigate towards preferential environments and is also involved in host infection by some pathogenic bacteria. Many motile bacteria contain several, sometimes purely cytoplasmic chemotaxis systems. In order to gain structural and mechanistic insight into this bacterial signal transduction system we use electron cryotomography to study the three-dimensional architecture of these highly organized chemosensory systems at molecular resolution.