From owner-biophysics@net.bio.net Thu Apr 15 23:00:00 1999 Path: biosci!news.stanford.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-feed.inet.tele.dk!bofh.vszbr.cz!newsfeed.nacamar.de!newsfeed.nacamar.de!rz.uni-karlsruhe.de!news.uni-stuttgart.de!news.belwue.de!news.uni-freiburg.de!not-for-mail From: Alexander Haber Newsgroups: bionet.biophysics Subject: Re: Mechanism for the Adhesion of Microorganisms???? Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 12:06:50 +0200 Organization: Rechenzentrum der Universitaet Freiburg, Germany Lines: 17 Message-ID: <37170BB9.16B066B2@mail.uni-freiburg.de> References: <3715E5D0.956E2DFA@student.uu.se> NNTP-Posting-Host: s135.stusie.uni-freiburg.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [de] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: de Well, I don't know lots about bacterias, but I think they are too big to just explain that they are sticking at the membrane with the force of adhesion. If they are thin maybee. The quotient of molecules on the surface of the bacteria which could be adhesive to adsorbents to the amount of molecules which are inside the bacteria and can't take part at the interaction has to be small. But are you sure the bacterias didn't just use their little hair to swim against the current ? Maybee you caused a region with another liquid having other phisical attributes (where for example sugar solved into the solvens and didn't mix right with the environmental liquid so it caused a >bubble<) where the bacterias stayed. ;-) Tassadar .