Fig. 2.

Cells are deformed elastically by pulse-like forces. (A) Microscopy images of the E. coli cell from Movie S1 taken at different stages of the experiment. The cell initially grows straight out of the microchannel. We applied pulse-like flow to the straight cell repeatedly every several minutes (Upper). This resulted in completely reversible deformations (two examples are shown, Lower Left and Lower Right). (B) The tip positions (x, y) of the cell from multiple experiments are compared with the theoretical predictions of the linear elasticity theory (Supporting Information). An actual cell shape is superimposed on one of the theoretical curves.