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Science 3 March 2000:
Vol. 287. no. 5458, pp. 1652 - 1655
DOI: 10.1126/science.287.5458.1652
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Reports

An Ultrasensitive Bacterial Motor Revealed by Monitoring Signaling Proteins in Single Cells

Philippe Cluzel, 1* Michael Surette, 2 Stanislas Leibler 1

Understanding biology at the single-cell level requires simultaneous measurements of biochemical parameters and behavioral characteristics in individual cells. Here, the output of individual flagellar motors in Escherichia coli was measured as a function of the intracellular concentration of the chemotactic signaling protein. The concentration of this molecule, fused to green fluorescent protein, was monitored with fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. Motors from different bacteria exhibited an identical steep input-output relation, suggesting that they actively contribute to signal amplification in chemotaxis. This experimental approach can be extended to quantitative in vivo studies of other biochemical networks.

1 Departments of Physics and of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
2 Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 4N1.
*   To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: phcluzel{at}phoenix.princeton.edu

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Molecular Information Processing: Lessons from Bacterial Chemotaxis.
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)