TraitMech

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aerotaxis

traitmech:000589 · CLASS · PROPOSED

A motile phenotype in which active locomotion is directionally biased along an oxygen concentration gradient toward preferred oxygen conditions.

Trait evidence (3)

  • DOI:10.1128/jb.169.7.3118-3123.1987
    at high concentrations, oxygen was a repellent of Salmonella typhimurium, Escherichia coli, and some bacilli

    Abstract, exact-matched at Europe PMC (PMID:3036771); full text not inspected. The study contrasts high-oxygen repulsion with attraction at lower concentrations and reports temporal assays. This supports concentration-dependent response direction, not universal thresholds or a requirement that every organism exhibit both signs. The abstract's tentative receptor interpretation is not promoted to an established mechanism.

  • DOI:10.1128/jb.178.17.5199-5204.1996
    As a result of aerotaxis, the bacteria were attracted to a specific low concentration of oxygen (3 to 5 microM).

    Abstract, exact-matched at Europe PMC (PMID:8752338); full text not inspected. Azospirillum brasilense forms a band in a spatial oxygen gradient and returns when swimming into higher or lower oxygen; temporal gradients corroborate the response. The preferred interval is experiment-specific. Proton motive force peaks in the same interval, but its proposed signaling role remains a hypothesis, not a protein-resolved causal edge. No strain-level canonical example is inferred from the abstract.

  • DOI:10.1103/PhysRevE.106.034404
    runs in the direction of the oxygen source (x < 0) are longer and more frequent.

    Section II.B, page 3; published 2022-09-15. Published full text and Appendices A-E read at the author's institutional copy: https://www.fast.universite-paris-saclay.fr/~moisy/papers/2022_bouvard_pre.pdf. Figures 1-2 and the typeset x < 0 passage visually checked. Tracking in an oxygen-gradient capillary shows directional bias in Burkholderia contaminans; nonmotile cells are excluded with a 6 micrometre-per-second velocity threshold. The fitted response model does not identify a molecular receptor.

Provenance

Identifier source
TraitMech local identifier
Definition source
DOI:10.1128/jb.178.17.5199-5204.1996

Parent traits (1)

kg-microbe context

No kg-microbe node embedding matched this record in the 2026-04-25 deepwalk.

Canonical examples (1)

Organisms cited as exemplars of this trait. Taxon ids are NCBITaxon and link out to the NCBI record.

  • Burkholderia contaminans NCBITaxon:488447 DOI:10.1103/PhysRevE.106.034404 Section II.A describes an unnamed environmental strain, identified using 16S and recA fragments and selected for strong aerotaxis. Figure 2 reports the motile subpopulation's bias toward the oxygen source. NCBI resolved 488447 on 2026-10-04 at species rank, not as this exact isolate. This is not a universal strain or cell-level claim.

Discussions and Knowledge Gaps (2)

Open questions attached to this trait. Seeded by just knowledge-gap-scan and curated; see the corpus-wide index.

Preserve oxygen-directed scope and verify external equivalents.

CURATION TODO OPEN aerotaxis-direction-and-mapping-boundaries · raised by codex · 2026-10-04

Not yet attached to a section of this record — a curator sets attaches_to (e.g. causal_graphs#some_edge) so the gap shows beside the mechanism it concerns.

Preferred oxygen need not be the highest available oxygen. Oxygen-dependent growth, respiration, tolerance and speed changes alone do not establish directional locomotion. Aerotaxis is narrower than general chemotaxis, while magnetic alignment and magnetoaerotaxis are not exact synonyms. The existing chemotaxis record is flagellar-specific; motile is the verified broader METPO parent without imposing that apparatus. No external xref or synonym is asserted before authority resolution and an organismal-disposition scope check.

Ground molecular branches and the exact environmental isolate.

CURATION TODO OPEN aerotaxis-mechanism-and-isolate-grounding · raised by codex · 2026-10-04

Not yet attached to a section of this record — a curator sets attaches_to (e.g. causal_graphs#some_edge) so the gap shows beside the mechanism it concerns.

A proton-motive-force correlation or a fitted response law does not establish a universal oxygen receptor or molecular pathway. Add causal graphs only after direct primary evidence and taxon-paired protein accessions have been verified; no NONMECHANISTIC graph bypasses this requirement. The canonical example lacks a published strain designation or accession; retain its species-level and motile-subpopulation qualifiers until isolate-specific identity can be resolved.

Curation history

  1. · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex

    Added aerotaxis with three primary DOI citations and exact snippets. Ignored-and-hidden searches found no exact live trait or METPO term. Reserved METPO:1054300 in v466. Kept attraction and repulsion within concentration-dependent directional scope, added a qualified NCBI-resolved environmental-isolate example, and deferred unverified molecular mechanisms and external mappings.