In this video, we're going to begin our introduction to prokaryotic flagella, which is a little bit different than eukaryotic flagella. Flagella is actually the plural form of the word; the singular form is flagellum. These flagella are really just long, filamentous surface proteins that drive the motility of cells. In other words, they help to propel the cell through its environment to allow the cell to move throughout its environment.

The term tuft is referring to a group of many flagella on the surface of a cell. If we take a look at this image below, you'll notice that we're showing you a bacterium here, a single bacterial cell. It has these long, filamentous surface proteins extending off of it; these are the flagella, while the individual one is a flagellum. A group of a bunch of flagella, as we see here, is collectively referred to as a tuft. These flagella can move in a very specific way to act as a propeller to propel the bacterial cell through its environment so that it is capable of moving in a specific direction.

You can see here that we've got a car that's in motion to show that these flagella are important for motility and for the movement of the cell. These flagella can be distributed in many different ways across the bacterial surface. This here concludes our brief introduction to prokaryotic flagella, and we'll be able to continue to learn more about them as we move forward. So I'll see you all in our next video.