Life · life

Bacterial flagellar motor

Motor · H

Numbers
Up to a few hundred revolutions a second in E. coli, and over a thousand in some species.
Kind
Motor

Function

An electric motor built from protein: a rotor, a ring of stator units, and a drive shaft turning a helical filament like a propeller. It is driven by protons falling across the membrane, and it can reverse in under a millisecond, which is how a bacterium changes direction.

Elements

H

Open on the Life shelf — the interactive card, the filters, and everything alongside it.

From the Life database in Notion, last edited 2026-08-25. This page is the row, rendered by the build; nothing on it is written by hand.