identifier: traitmech:000702 label: swimming motility definition: A motile phenotype in which an organism propels itself through a liquid medium. definition_source: DOI:10.1038/s41467-020-18253-7 trait_category: MORPHOLOGY term_kind: CLASS mapping_status: PROPOSED parent_traits: - METPO:1000702 evidence: - reference: DOI:10.1038/s41467-020-18253-7 snippet: Their swimming direction is stabilised by their flagella (archaella) notes: 'Thornton et al. 2020, PMID:32901025, PMC7478972, scientific abstract. Qualified MED identity, title and DOI checked. Results, Swimming behaviour in three dimensions, and Methods on culture and holographic reconstruction directly support liquid swimming by environmental Haloferax sp. Boulby Mine and Haloarcula sp. Great Salt Lake isolates. Mean-squared displacement separated swimming from diffusion. Figure 2 was visually inspected; Supplementary Note 1 describes sampling locations. Methods explicitly leave exact species unresolved. Cultures were grown in 25% dissolved-salt MGM to early exponential phase. The measured trajectories, not merely genes or simulations, support the phenotype. Chemotactic efficiency simulations do not define swimming or establish a universal speed optimum. Raw movies were not reanalyzed. MED, Crossref and the retrieved publisher page exposed no linked correction or retraction at the check. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18253-7.' - reference: DOI:10.1038/s41467-018-07802-w snippet: However, the free-swimming capability of the different strains did not correlate well to the spreading capability in soft agar. notes: 'Kuhn et al. 2018, PMID:30560868, PMC6299084, Results, Filament composition affects flagella-mediated swimming; quote checked directly in full-text XML, not the abstract. Qualified MED identity and DOI checked. Figure 3 and Supplementary Table 1 (printed p. 10, PDF p. 11) were visually inspected. Main Results describe a delta-flaA2B2 background, called wild type for the polar system. Supplementary Figure 11 (printed p. 7, PDF p. 8) instead retains both lateral flagellins for a separate soft-agar assay. Preserve this discrepancy; do not apply the main-text claim to every experiment. Methods distinguish three-dimensional cell tracking in regular or Ficoll-supplemented liquid from soft-agar spreading, and reject Brownian-only tracks. Thus liquid swimming is observed in engineered material; it is not inferred from agar halos or a sequence feature. Filament simulations are separate model evidence. Raw movies were not reanalyzed. MED, Crossref and the retrieved publisher page exposed no linked correction or retraction at the check. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07802-w.' discussions: - discussion_id: swimming-motility-scope-and-assays prompt: Keep liquid propulsion distinct from surface movement and passive displacement. kind: CURATION_TODO status: OPEN rationale: Motile METPO:1000702 is the broader energy-dependent locomotion phenotype. Swimming concerns propulsion through liquid, including near a boundary, not locomotion across a supporting substrate. Swarming traitmech:000062, twitching traitmech:000061 and gliding METPO:1000706 are not exact synonyms. Passive advection, settling, Brownian motion, colony growth and appendage possession alone are insufficient. Neither a particular speed, solitary behavior, chemotaxis nor a specified propulsion apparatus is required. Bacterial flagella and archaeal archaella must not be conflated. An organism can exhibit swimming and surface motility in different conditions; no organism-level disjointness is asserted. Existing flagellar-motility process nodes, swimming-velocity capacities and taxis discussions are not exact ungrounded instances of this trait. Upstream METPO issue 271 requests this gap; it does not supply an accepted identifier. External phenotype equivalences and lexical variants remain unasserted pending authority checks. posed_by: codex posed_date: '2026-10-11' - discussion_id: swimming-motility-examples-and-mechanisms prompt: Resolve taxon-specific examples and mechanisms without inferring motion from sequence. kind: KNOWLEDGE_GAP status: OPEN rationale: 'No canonical examples are assigned in this first pass: the haloarchaeal isolates lack resolved species identities in the study, and exact taxon anchors for the bacterial experimental background have not been independently verified here. Engineered material remains valid qualified phenotype evidence, not an unmodified natural exemplar. A causal graph is deferred pending source-bounded branches and eligible taxon-paired protein examples. Do not impose one lineage''s motor or chemotaxis machinery on all swimming organisms, or use a NONMECHANISTIC graph to bypass grounding requirements. A flagellin, archaellin, motor gene or predicted motility system alone does not establish liquid propulsion under a tested condition. The present evidence covers bacterial and archaeal cases, not a systematic survey of eukaryotic propulsion or every swimming mechanism.' posed_by: codex posed_date: '2026-10-11' curation_history: - timestamp: '2026-10-11T18:17:31Z' curator: codex action: MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID changes: Added liquid swimming motility beneath motile with two DOI-backed primary studies and checked verbatim abstract/full-text snippets. Ignored/hidden worktree, live ontology and pending-PR checks support 000702 and v578 block 1065500-1065599. Existing records unchanged. Assay, strain and sequence-inference limits are explicit. Timestamp records the observed UTC curation decision. llm_assisted: true - timestamp: '2026-10-11T18:27:36Z' curator: codex action: CURATED_WITH_LITERATURE changes: 'Corrected the unqualified bacterial strain-background statement after visually checking Supplementary Figure 11. Attributed the main-text deletion claim and retained the supplementary lateral-flagellin exception without conflating soft-agar and liquid assays. Addresses issue #1872; prior curation event preserved.' llm_assisted: true