The pirate in the microbe

Pirates could have copied the technique they use to capture ships from bacteria. Like buccaneers who draw their boat to a target ship with grappling hooks, the single-cell organisms use threadlike appendages, called pili, to creep along a surface. A research team from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam-Golm and University of Cologne have now developed a model to describe the organisms' movement. Biologists have long known that microbes attach pili to a substrate and t