Phage-infected bacteria rotate (top row) before abruptly stopping (middle) and lysing (bottom).
Young/NAS
Just before they lyse, bacteria infected with lambda phage have no idea what is about to hit them, according to Angelika Gründling, Mike Manson, and Ry Young of Texas A&M University (College Station, TX). Gründling watched bugs spin around their single tethered flagella as an indicator that their membranes were still energized. The spinning stopped abruptly a few seconds before the cells lysed, thus contradicting the assumptions of one model for lysis timing.
That model was born from the observation that membrane energy poisons induce lysis prematurely. Energy poisons, some suggested, were merely accelerating a normal process of gradual proton leakage. In this model, phage-produced holin proteins would cause the leak, until a critical reduction in proton motive force (pmf) across the membrane triggered any remaining holins to form into pores and...
