AN ELEPHANT might win an individual tug of war, but when it comes to a weight-for-weight contest the bacterium that causes gonorrhoea wins hands down. These microbes, it seems, can muster a pull equivalent to a human lifting 10,000 tonnes.
Many bacteria have long, thin, contractile filaments called pili. Neisseria gonorrhoeae uses them to crawl, and to attach to cells and infect them. Michael Sheetz and colleagues at Columbia University in New York have now discovered that the bacteria bundle these pili in groups of up to 10 filaments to increase the force of contraction – and unlike…
