Data from: High-speed motility originates from cooperatively pushing and pulling flagella bundles in bilophotrichous bacteria

Bacteria propel and change direction by rotating long, helical filaments,
called flagella. The number of flagella, their arrangement on the cell
body and their sense of rotation hypothetically determine the locomotion
characteristics of a species. The movement of the most rapid
microorganisms has in particular remained unexplored because of additional
experimental limitations. We show that magnetotactic cocci with two
flagella bundles on one pole swim faster than 500 μm·s-1 along a double
helical path, making them one of the fastest natural microswimmers. We
additionally reveal that the cells reorient in less than 5 ms, an order of
magnitude faster than reported so far for any other bacteria. Using
hydrodynamic modeling, we demonstrate that a mode where a pushing and a
pulling bundle cooperate is the only possibility to enable both helical
tracks and fast reorientations. The advantage of sheathed flagella bundles
is the high rigidity, making high swimming speeds possible.