P. aeruginosa is an opportunistic, nosocomial pathogen for immunocompromised individuals. It typically infects the airway, urinary tract, burns, wounds, and also causes blood infections. Biofilms of P. aeruginosa can cause chronic opportunistic infections, which are a serious problem for medical care in industrialized societies, especially for immunocompromised patients and the elderly. They often cannot be treated effectively with traditional antibiotic therapy. Thus, P. aeruginosa is notorious a killer for those immunocompromised patients. Recently, the research group of Prof. Fan Jin from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has uncovered how P. aeruginosa use the type-IV pili to adapt to their physical surroundings. They found that P. aeruginosa cells slingshot more on soft surfaces at a shear-thinning condition, which greatly facilitates their surface crawling by means of reducing energy dissipation. This adaptive response suggests that P. aeruginosa cells may be able to sense the local viscoelasticity and then deploy TFP to adapt to their physical surroundings. This findings has a great impact to understand how P. aeruginosa infects the soft tissues in the early stage. This work has been published on Nature Communications with the title of "Bacteria slingshot more on soft surfaces”.

Jin’s Group at USTC mainly works on surface motility and adaptability in P. aeruginosa. Prof. Jin and his collaborator in the UCLA have been made a series remarkable findings on bacterial surface motilities and adaptabilities in recent years, including that they found that bacteria can “walk” on surfaces (Science，330，197，2010), bacteria can “slingshot” on surfaces (PNAS，108，12617，2011), and bacteria can follow the trials that were remained by others (Nature，497，7449，2013).

 

The co-first authors, ZHANG Rongrong and NI Lei, are two Ph.D students from the HFNL or the Department of Chemical physics at USTC. This work was supported by NSFC.

 

Link to the paper

 

(JIN Fan, HFNL)