thumb|250px|upright|right|A Bacillus cereus cell that has undergone filamentation following antibacterial treatment (upper electron micrograph; top right) and regularly sized cells of untreated B. cereus (lower electron micrograph) Filamentation is the anomalous growth of certain bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, in which cells continue to elongate but do not divide (no septa formation). The cells that result from elongation without division have multiple chromosomal copies.
thumb|250px|upright|right|A Bacillus cereus cell that has undergone filamentation following antibacterial treatment (upper electron micrograph; top right) and regularly sized cells of untreated B. cereus (lower electron micrograph) Filamentation is the anomalous growth of certain bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, in which cells continue to elongate but do not divide (no septa formation). The cells that result from elongation without division have multiple chromosomal copies.
In the absence of antibiotics or other stressors, filamentation occurs at a low frequency in bacterial populations (4–8% short filaments and 0–5% long filaments in 1- to 8-hour cultures). The increased cell length can protect bacteria from protozoan predation and neutrophil phagocytosis by making ingestion of cells more difficult. Filamentation is also thought to protect bacteria from antibiotics, and is associated with other aspects of bacterial virulence such as biofilm formation.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).