Bacterial flagellar coiling explained by slip-and-click strand switching
Donald L. D. Caspar1
1Donald L. D. Caspar is at the Institute of Molecular Biophysics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306-4380, USA.
The reversible spiral twisting of the flagellar propeller arises from combinations of interconvertible left- and right-tilted arrays of identical flagellin subunits, mediated by the restraints of their inner tube domains in 11 near-axial protofilament strands of different length in the flagellum.
