Extended Data Fig. 1: Experimental methods.
From: The colloidal nature of complex fluids enhances bacterial motility
a, The average swimming speed of bacteria V as a function of time after a bacterial suspension is injected into a PDMS microchannel. V is normalized by the average speed at time t = 0. The vertical dashed line indicates the maximum measurement time of our experiments of 15 min. b, Comparison of the average swimming speed of bacteria V in suspensions of Ficoll 400 of increasing concentrations c from our experiments with that from a previous study. V is normalized by the average swimming speed in the pure buffer V0. c is the weight percentage concentration. Blue circles are from our experiments, whereas orange diamonds are from ref. 16. c. Determination of the intrinsic viscosity of dilute solutions of carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) of average molecular weight 700,000. The viscosities of the solutions η as a function of polymer concentrations c are extracted from ref. 18. ηs is the solvent viscosity. c is in unit of g/ml. The slope of the linear fit gives [η] = 56,344.1 ml/g.
