The effect of sugars on the morphology of the bacterial flagellum

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Abstract
Using dark‐field microscopy, we have found that certain sugars cause the normal‐to‐curly helical transition of bacterial flagella. Titration of flagella isolated from Salmonella typhimwium with 16 different carbohydrates showed that: (i) only certain sugars cause the transition. There is no obvious relationship between the simple physico‐chemical properties of the sugar and whether the sugar causes the transition or not; (ii) the efficacies of sugars that do cause the transition differ markedly. For these sugars there is a relationship between efficacy and molecular size. These results suggest that the specific, though weak, binding of sugars to sites on flagella cause the morphological transition.