Scientists have long known what drives the flagellum to spin, but what causes the flagellum to stop spinning — temporarily or permanently — was unknown.

“We think it’s pretty cool that evolving bacteria and human engineers arrived at a similar solution to the same problem,” said IU Bloomington biologist Daniel Kearns, who led the project. “How do you temporarily stop a motor once it gets going?”

The action of the protein they discovered, EpsE, is very similar to that of a car clutch. In cars, the clutch controls whether a car’s engine is connected to the parts that spin its wheels.

-ScienceDaily (June 23, 2008)

Excerpts from The Design Matrix (2007):

We are actually using the knowledge about our own designed artifacts to shed light on biology and how it works. Imagine if there were no computers, tape recorders, and washing machines. Take away human technology, and suddenly, there are no good metaphors left to describe life. - p 52

All of this, of course, makes sense if life really is carbon-based nanotechnology. To understand an alien technology, we would have to use our own technology as a model, and the more similar the technologies, the more easily we could characterize and understand this alien technology. - p 53

If living processes are the products of design, it comes as no surprise that so much of biology is more akin to the study of engineering than to chemistry or physics. Furthermore, it would make sense that as our understanding of the cell advances, that teleological concepts, including the very concept of design, would proliferate in the biological literature. Much of this design terminology stems from the fact that biologists have discovered that cells are filled with miniature machines and that coded information is stored and employed for the synthesis of these machines.- p. 59

Looking at a cell is like looking into the future of our own designs. – p. 204