rheotaxis

traitmech:000582 · CLASS · PROPOSED

A motile phenotype in which fluid velocity gradients bias an organism's self-propelled movement.

Trait evidence (2)

DOI:10.1073/pnas.1120955109
Rheotaxis is the directed movement resulting from fluid velocity gradients

Abstract and Results, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3324032/ (PMID:22411815). Smooth-swimming Bacillus subtilis OI4139 exhibits transverse swimming in bulk shear flow. Physical reorientation couples to active propulsion; passive advection alone is insufficient. This is not restricted to upstream migration or receptor-mediated sensing. OI4139 is a mutant that almost never tumbles, not a wild-type canonical exemplar; no strain accession is inferred.
DOI:10.1016/j.bpj.2012.03.001
positive rheotaxis (rapid and continuous upstream motility) in wild-type Escherichia coli freely swimming over a surface

Abstract, with strain and preparation in Materials and Methods, Bacteria preparation; behavioral regimes in Results and Figures 3-6. The publisher-formatted article was read at https://sacredheart.elsevierpure.com/ws/portalfiles/portal/39998836/Kaya_BJ12_Bacteria.pdf (PMID:22500751). K12 cells underwent 3-5 rounds of motility selection. Moderate shear supported upstream swimming near the channel ceiling; higher shear produced sideways swimming and downstream drag. The study does not establish universal upstream motion, a universal shear threshold, or in-vivo infection. Supplementary movies were not viewed.

Provenance

Identifier source: TraitMech local identifier
Definition source: DOI:10.1073/pnas.1120955109

Parent traits (1)

motile METPO:1000702

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.

Escherichia coli K-12 NCBITaxon:83333 DOI:10.1016/j.bpj.2012.03.001 Kaya and Koser's wild-type K12 population after 3-5 motility-selection rounds, swimming near a PDMS channel ceiling under moderate shear. This condition-qualified example does not cover every K-12 cell or flow regime. No more specific K-12 substrain is inferred.

Discussions and Knowledge Gaps (1)

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

Ground separate surface and bulk-flow mechanisms without inventing a shear-sensing protein.

CURATION TODO OPEN rheotaxis-context-specific-mechanism-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.

The cited studies support hydrodynamic reorientation coupled to powered swimming, but surface-associated upstream motion and bulk transverse motion must not be collapsed into one universal mechanism. A protein-resolved causal graph is deferred pending a verified link between a primary mechanistic experiment, its precise strain and an accession-level protein example. OI4139 must not be silently identified as strain 168. No graph or protein accession is asserted in this first-pass identity record. QuickGO search for rheotaxis returned no term on 2026-10-04; no exact external xref is asserted.

Curation history

2026-10-04T00:17:45Z · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex
Added rheotaxis with two primary DOI citations, contiguous snippets and a condition-qualified K-12 example resolved at NCBI. Ignored-and-hidden searches found no exact trait or METPO class. Reserved METPO:1053600 in proposal v459; deferred a protein-resolved graph rather than infer strain/protein identity.