Bacterial Chemotaxis and Molecular Neurobiology
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
What is the relationship of bacteria to molecular neurobiology? Like more complex creatures, many bacteria have sensory receptors and effectors (the flagella) and between receptors and effectors lies a system that integrates and transmits information. This is diagramed in Figure 1.
We wish to understand these aspects of “neurobiology” in bacteria. In doing that, we hope to discover facts and concepts applicable to neurobiology of more-complicated organisms.1
In bacteria, we study chemotaxis: the movement of organisms toward attractant chemicals or away from repellent chemicals. One can summarize the mechanism of bacterial chemotaxis as follows (Springer et al. 1979; Koshland 1980; Taylor and Laszlo 1982; Boyd and Simon 1982; Macnab 1982; Parkinson and Hazelbauer 1983):
Bacteria have many different chemoreceptors (Adler 1969). These are either peripheral proteins, called receptors in Figure 2, for attractants such as D-galactose, D-ribose, and maltose (Adler 1975; Koshland 1980), or they are the membrane-bound methyl-accepting chemotaxis...
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↵1 “Modern studies of biology have revealed a universality among living things. For example, all organisms have much in common when it comes to their metabolism and genetics. Is it not possible that all organisms also share common mechanisms for responding to stimuli by movement? Just as the higher organisms' machinery for metabolism and genetics appears to have evolved from processes already present in the lowest forms, so it is possible that the nervous system and behavior of higher organisms evolved from chemical reactions that can be found even in the most primitive living things. From this point of view one may hope that a knowledge of the mechanisms of motility and chemotaxis in bacteria might contribute to our understanding of neurobiology and psychology” (Adler 1966).
