The colloidal nature of complex fluids enhances bacterial motility

The natural habitats of microorganisms in the human microbiome, ocean and soil ecosystems are full of colloids and macromolecules. Such environments exhibit non-Newtonian flow properties, drastically affecting the locomotion of microorganisms^1–5. Although the low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics of swimming flagellated bacteria in simple Newtonian fluids has been well developed^6–9, our understanding of bacterial motility in complex non-Newtonian fluids is less mature^10,11. Even after six decades of research, fundamental questions about the nature and origin of bacterial motility enhancement in polymer solutions are still under debate^12–23. Here we show that flagellated bacteria in dilute colloidal suspensions display quantitatively similar motile behaviours to those in dilute polymer solutions, in particular a universal particle-size-dependent motility enhancement up to 80% accompanied by a strong suppression of bacterial wobbling^18,24. By virtue of the hard-sphere nature of colloids, whose size and volume fraction we vary across experiments, our results shed light on the long-standing controversy over bacterial motility enhancement in complex fluids and suggest that polymer dynamics may not be essential for capturing the phenomenon^12–23. A physical model that incorporates the colloidal nature of complex fluids quantitatively explains bacterial wobbling dynamics and mobility enhancement in both colloidal and polymeric fluids. Our findings contribute to the understanding of motile behaviours of bacteria in complex fluids, which are relevant for a wide range of microbiological processes²⁵ and for engineering bacterial swimming in complex environments^26,27.