On the Origin of Mitosing Cells by Lynn Sagan appeared in the March 1967 edition of the Journal of Theoretical Biology. At the time the article was published, Lynn Sagan had divorced astronomer Carl Sagan, but kept his last name. Later, she remarried and changed her name to Lynn Margulis,…
On the Origin of Mitosing Cells by Lynn Sagan appeared in the March 1967 edition of the Journal of Theoretical Biology. At the time the article was published, Lynn Sagan had divorced astronomer Carl Sagan, but kept his last name. Later, she remarried and changed her name to Lynn Margulis, and will be referred to as such throughout this article. In her 1967 article, Margulis develops a theory for the origin of complex cells that have enclosed nuclei, called eukaryotic cells. She proposes that three organelles: mitochondria, plastids, and basal bodies, which are all parts of eukaryotic cells, were once free-living cells that took residence inside primitive eukaryotic cells. This process Margulis called endosymbiosis. Margulis' theory explained the origin of eukaryote cells, which are the fundamental cell type of most multicellular organisms and form the basis of embryogenesis. After fertilization, embryos develop from a single eukaryotic cell that divides by mitosis.
The propulsion matrix provides a compact description of the locomotion of a single flagella molecular motor in a low Reynolds number environment. The locomotion properties of individual flagellar motors are central to bacterial behavior, including chemotaxis, pathogenesis, and biofilm formation. However, because conventional hydrodynamic measurement approaches require applied forces, torques,…
The propulsion matrix provides a compact description of the locomotion of a single flagella molecular motor in a low Reynolds number environment. The locomotion properties of individual flagellar motors are central to bacterial behavior, including chemotaxis, pathogenesis, and biofilm formation. However, because conventional hydrodynamic measurement approaches require applied forces, torques, or fluid flows, it is not possible to directly measure the propulsion matrix for an individual microscale helical filament. Here, the limitations inherent to conventional measurement approaches are overcome using a combination of theoretical, experimental, and computational advancements. First, the relationship between the elements of the propulsion matrix with translational and rotational Brownian motion is derived using the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. Next, a volumetric fluorescent imaging using high resolution oblique plane microscopy with sufficient spatio-temporal resolution is conducted to resolve both translation and rotation of individual helical filaments isolated from E.coli's flagellar motor. Finally, a computational framework is developed to track individual helical filaments across six degrees of freedom, extract diffusion coefficients, and quantify the temporal correlation between translation and rotation. This study computed the maximum propulsion efficiency to be around 1.7%. Direct measurement of propulsion efficiency generally agrees with the ensemble and large-scale measurements previously performed using conventional hydrodynamic measurements. The findings suggest that the approach described here can be extended to more complex in-vitro experiments that evaluate microscale molecular motors. For example, evaluating sperm motility without inducing chemotaxis or utilizing a microfluidic setup.
