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bacterial polar flagellar ejection

traitmech:000732 · CLASS · PROPOSED

A physiological phenotype in which a bacterium actively ejects previously assembled axial structures of a polar flagellum by separation at its base.

Trait evidence (3)

  • DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.3000165
    Plesiomonas cells consistently lose their flagella at the base of the hook

    Ferreira et al. 2019, PMID:30889173, PMC6424402. Results, Shed hook-filament structures accumulate in P. shigelloides supernatant, sole paragraph (HTML anchor article1.body1.sec2.sec4.p1; PDF pp. 4-5); Figure 1G. Direct publisher full-text match; native NOT_IN_ABSTRACT. Hook-bearing released structures, population counts and relic/assembly comparisons support ejection rather than daughter-cell dilution or passive midfilament breakage. Nutrient-depletion conditions vary among assays; minimal medium containing glucose is not complete carbon starvation. All 25 main PDF pages and six figures were inspected, not raw supplementary data. Energy conservation and leakage prevention are interpretations.

  • DOI:10.1111/mmi.14511
    bacteria can actively abandon flagella after prolonged stationary culturing

    Zhuang et al. 2020, PMID:32259388, scientific abstract, sentence beginning Interestingly. Direct MED/publisher match and native VERIFIED. Main publisher text and six figure captions were subsequently read, not the actual figures or supplement. Sections 2.4-2.7 separate daughter-cell dilution from stationary-phase shedding. OD times flagellated fraction is a population proxy, not a direct cell count. VIO5 and engineered EGFP-FliG strain NMB344 are distinct; red/green panels in Figure 3 are not the same cells. Two-color experiments in Figures 5-6 support basal release, but rod breakage is inferred, not a directly imaged cut. Surface immobilization and medium exchanges constrain the assay.

  • DOI:10.1038/s41467-026-75593-6
    Nutrient depletion significantly increases the frequency of flagellar shedding and the accumulation of closed FOMCs

    Guo et al. 2026, PMID:42660870, PMC13521929.1, Results, Two distinct in situ architectures of the flagellar motor in V. cholerae, and Supplementary Figure 4. Direct JATS match; native NOT_IN_ABSTRACT. FOMC denotes the flagellar outer membrane complex. The quoted experiment uses wild-type V. cholerae; delta-flhG structural samples are distinct. All 12 main PDF pages and six main figures were inspected, plus the actual supplementary Figure 4 and supplementary tables. Its 81/273 observations are cells in the figure caption and tomograms in Methods/Table 4, not biological replicates or ejection rates. The main-text Table 3 pointer instead corresponds to Table 4. Other supplements remain incompletely read.

Provenance

Identifier source
TraitMech local identifier
Definition source
DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.3000165

Parent traits (1)

kg-microbe context

Matched 1 kg-microbe node via parent_proxy.

  • METPO:1000059 [-2.682, -2.070, -3.656, -0.652, …]

512-dim DeepWalkSkipGramEnsmallen embedding from kg-microbe (2026-04-25).

Nearest neighbors in embedding space

Top-8 cosine-similar METPO traits from the 2026-04-25 deepwalk (512-D).

Discussions and Knowledge Gaps (4)

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

Review active basal release separately from possession, loss and resorption.

CURATION TODO OPEN bacterial-polar-flagellar-ejection-scope · raised by codex · 2026-10-15

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.

This qualified phenotype requires active basal release of previously assembled polar flagellar axial structures. Hook-filament release is an observed endpoint, not a universal component-completeness requirement. Flagellar possession or arrangement, assembly failure, motor arrest, reduced motility, a decreasing flagellated fraction or passive filament breakage alone do not establish it. Periplasmic resorption and microbial-eukaryotic axonemal autotomy are distinct. Phenotype METPO:1000059 is a definition-based parent inference; locomotory possession is not a required parent. The definition does not require every flagellum to be lost, nonmotility, a particular stimulus, exact severing site, relic morphology or universal behavior among polar-flagellated bacteria. No bare shedding or deflagellation exact synonym is asserted.

Review the phenotype hierarchy without reviving retired flagellar identifiers.

CURATION TODO OPEN bacterial-polar-flagellar-ejection-metpo · raised by codex · 2026-10-15

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.

Pinned and current METPO release annotations distinguish motility, locomotory flagellar possession and polar arrangement from ejection. Historical METPO:0000089 and METPO:000090 are deprecated with OMO:0001000; METPO:1000381 is deprecated with IAO:0000226. Their replacement METPO:1000704 denotes possession, not shedding. Deprecated flagellum METPO:1000123 has OMO:0001000 and no observed replacement or consider annotation. These are not exact mappings and are not reactivated. The current editor is an import stub, not a full release. The ontology pin remains unchanged. Proposal v608 reserves METPO:1068500 within 1068500-1068599; the local identifier is traitmech:000732. No upstream release or human sign-off is implied.

Keep organismal ejection separate from universal molecular and sequence claims.

KNOWLEDGE GAP OPEN bacterial-polar-flagellar-ejection-mechanism · raised by codex · 2026-10-15

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.

The 2026 structures assign closure to FlgI conformational changes in V. cholerae; the 2019 interpretation of an unidentified added plug is not imposed as a universal mechanism. Assembly defects in gate-deletion mutants do not by themselves demonstrate failure of ejection. Cryo-ET states are not a longitudinal trajectory of the same motor. A protein-resolved causal graph needs taxon-paired authority-checked accessions and edge-specific evidence. Gene, motif and domain presence alone do not establish this organism-level phenotype. Mechanisms are deferred, not claimed absent.

Resolve assay-specific strain provenance before asserting canonical taxa.

KNOWLEDGE GAP OPEN bacterial-polar-flagellar-ejection-provenance · raised by codex · 2026-10-15

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.

Source organism names remain qualified observations, not independently resolved canonical taxon assertions. Engineered structural samples and source-designated wild-type nutrient assays must not be conflated. MED metadata and accessible publisher text were checked; unavailable publisher or PubMed pages are access limits, not evidence that no notice exists. This is not comprehensive correction/retraction clearance, raw-data reanalysis, independent replication, paid research or human sign-off.

Curation history

  1. · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex

    Added active basal release of assembled bacterial polar flagellar structures with three primary DOI sources and directly checked 12/9/15-word snippets. Native NOT_IN_ABSTRACT/VERIFIED/NOT_IN_ABSTRACT remain distinct from direct full-text checks. Reserved 000732, v608 and 1068500-1068599 after ignored/hidden current-file, retained-history, complete-range and open/draft PR checks, including the changed CommunityMech PR2018 worktree. No obsolete identifier, exact mapping, canonical taxon or universal molecular mechanism is inferred. Timestamp records observed acceptance, not source acquisition.

  2. · CORRECT_EVIDENCE_LOCATOR · codex

    Corrected the Ferreira 2019 third-paragraph locator to the sole subsection paragraph, HTML anchor article1.body1.sec2.sec4.p1, spanning PDF pages 4-5. Preserved the verbatim excerpt, native NOT_IN_ABSTRACT outcome, biological claims and prior history. Source HTML and PDF pages were rechecked for issue #1947.

Recorded curation sessions

  • · codex
    • CREATE — Add bacterial polar flagellar ejection

      Added one PROPOSED active basal-release phenotype with three primary DOI sources and directly checked 12/9/15-word snippets. Native outcomes NOT_IN_ABSTRACT, VERIFIED and NOT_IN_ABSTRACT remain distinct from direct full-text checks. Reserved 000732, v608 and 1068500-1068599 after ignored/hidden current files, retained history, full ranges and open/draft PR checks, including changed CommunityMech PR2018 and its worktree. Phenotype parent is a definition-based inference. Preserved assay, strain and source-access limits; no obsolete identifier, canonical taxon, exact mapping or universal protein mechanism is inferred. Acceptance time is observed, not reconstructed source acquisition.

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  • · codex
    • EDIT — Correct Ferreira source paragraph locator

      Corrected evidence[0].notes and maintained writer, source receipt and proposal to the sole paragraph at publisher anchor article1.body1.sec2.sec4.p1, spanning PDF pages 4-5. Direct HTML and PDF inspection confirmed that the quote is verbatim, including Plesiomonas cells. Preserved biological content, native snippet outcomes and previous curation/history/review bytes. This supplements history/records/bacterial_polar_flagellar_ejection/2026-10-15T114344Z-codex-e46fbc.yaml; the original review missed the paragraph ordinal. Issue #1947 tracks the correction and successor review.

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