Biosensors reveal how single bacterium gets the message to split into a swimming and a stay-put cell

When certain bacteria reproduce by splitting in two, one cell inherits a propeller for swimming and the other builds a stalk to cling to surfaces. Researchers have developed biosensors to observe what was going on biochemically. They found that a signaling chemical c-di-GMP was unevenly distributed during cell division, and that the swimming cell got less than the stalk cell. The biosensors enabled the researchers to measure these fluctuations in a single bacterium smaller than any animal or plant cell.

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