The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Motile Behavior of Bacteria
Open accessAbstract
Escherichia coli is a single-celled organism that lives in your gut. It is equipped with a set of rotary motors only 45 nm in diameter. Each motor drives a long, thin, helical filament that extends several cell body lengths out into the external medium. The assemblage of motor and filament is called a flagellum. The concerted motion of several flagella enables a cell to swim. A cell can move toward regions that it deems more favorable by measuring changes in the concentrations of certain chemicals in its environment (mostly nutrients), deciding whether life is getting better or worse, and then modulating the direction of rotation of its flagella. Thus, in addition to rotary engines and propellers, E. coli's standard accessories include particle counters, rate meters, and gear boxes. This microorganism is a nanotechnologist's dream. I will discuss the features that make it so, from the perspectives of several scientific disciplines: anatomy, genetics, chemistry, and physics.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
The Rotary Motor of Bacterial Flagella
Berg, H. C. (2003) · Annual Review of Biochemistry · doi:10.1146/annurev.biochem.72.121801.161737 · Cited by 1,457
Self-citationSwimming at low Reynolds number: a beginners guide to undulatory locomotion
Cohen, N., & Boyle, J. H. (2010) · Contemporary Physics · doi:10.1080/00107510903268381 · Cited by 110
Metadata
- Authors
- Berg, H. C.
- Venue
- Physics Today
- Publisher
- AIP Publishing
- Published
- 2000-01-01
- Volume
- 53
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 24-29
- ISSN
- 0031-9228 (ISSN-L)
- 1945-0699
- OpenAlex
- W1964788963
- Cited by
- 407
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 5.19
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Motile Behavior of Bacteria. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1063/1.882934
- The paper
- Berg, H. C. (2000). Motile Behavior of Bacteria. Physics Today. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.882934
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.