Before bacteria exude that nice infectious slime, they “slingshot” about our person.

UCLA researchers were studying twitching motility, or how some species of bacteria move using hair-like appendages called type IV pili, or TFP.

“TFP act like Batman’s grappling hooks,” said Gerard Wong, a professor  at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the California NanoSystems Institute.

“These grappling hooks can extend and bind to a surface and retract and pull the cell along.”

Wong and his team noted the slingshot motion helped propel a pathogen quickly through molasses-like cells.

Wong said he hopes tracking movement patterns of bacteria could help with single-cell diagnostics.

“It gives us the possibility of not just identifying species of bacteria but the possibility of also identifying individual cells. Perhaps in the future, we can look at a cell and try to find the same cell later on the basis of how it moves,” he said in a release.

The study, which focused on Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a pathogen that helps cause deadly infections in cystic fibrosis, will be published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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So does this mean our bodies are a breeding ground for suffering and injustice? /nerd.