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. 2021 Oct 14;11:20464. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-99665-3

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Multiple bundling of type 1 pili on E. coli cells after the THz irradiation. (a) Three aggregated bacterial cells are shown, one of which carries numerous type 1 pili: these pili have a diameter of 7.0–7.5 nm and vary in length from 0.1 to 2 µm, with maximal length in rare case reaching 3 µm. (b) The copy of (a) in which pili are indicated by black lines. (c) A magnified part of (a) with numerous examples of bundled pili (indicated by arrows) at low magnification. (d) A magnified part of (a) in which the arrows indicate two-pilus bundles. (e) Changes in the diameter of a pilus, indicated by interconnected arrows. (f–i) Examples of 2-, 3-, and 4-pilus bundles. (j) Adhesion of two pili throughout their considerable length. The scale bar is 1 µm in (a,b), 0.1 µm in (c,j), and 50 nm in (d–j).