Bendingforcesplasticallydeformgrowingbacterialcellwalls.PDFVIP

Bending forces plastically deform growing bacterial cell walls a,1 b,c c a,b b,c,1 Ariel Amir , Farinaz Babaeipour , Dustin B. McIntosh , David R. Nelson , and Suckjoon Jun aDepartment of Physics and bFaculty of Arts and Sciences Center for Systems Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; and cDepartment of Physics and Section of Molecular Biology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093 Edited by Tom C. Lubensky, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, and approved February 28, 2014 (received for review October 1, 2013) Cell walls define a cell’s shape in bacteria. The walls are rigid to resist wide temporal range (from 1 s to over 1 h), and (ii ) we can large internal pressures, but remarkably plastic to adapt to a wide achieve force scales several orders of magnitude larger than range of external forces and geometric constraints. Currently, it is un- what is possible by optical traps (14) or atomic force micros- known how bacteria maintain their shape. In this paper, we develop copy (AFM) (15). Using this approach, we demonstrate that experimental and theoretical approaches and show that mechanical the cells can exhibit two fundamentally different modes of stresses regulate bacterial cell wall growth. By applying a precisely deformations and recover from them. The first mode is elastic controllable hydrodynamic force to growing rod-shaped Escherichia in that the cell recovers its shape as soon as the external force is coli and Bacillus subtilis cells, we demonstrate that the cells can exhibit removed. The other mode is plastic and requires growth for two fundamentally different modes