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Formation of spatial patterns of cells is a recurring theme in biology and often depends on regulated cell motility. Motility of M. xanthus depends on two motility machineries: the S-engine and A-engine. Moving M. xanthus cells can organize into spreading colonies or spore-filled fruiting bodies depending on their nutritional status. To understand these two pattern formation processes and the contributions by the two motility machineries, as well as cell reversal, we analyze spatial self-organization in 3 strains: i) a mutant that moves unidirectionally without reversing by the A-motility system only, ii) a unidirectional mutant that is also equipped with the S-motility system, and iii) the wild-type that, in addition to the two motility systems, reverses its direction of movement. The mutant moving by the A-engine illustrates that collective motion in the form of large moving clusters can arise in gliding bacteria due to steric interactions of the rod-shaped cells, without the need of invoking any biochemical signal regulation. The two-engine strain mutant reveals that the same phenomenon emerges when both motility systems are present, and as long as cells exhibit unidirectional motion only. From the study of these two strains, we conclude that unidirectional cell motion induces the formation of large moving clusters at low and intermediate densities, while it results into vortex formation at very high densities. These findings are consistent with what is known from self-propelled rods which strongly suggests that the combined effect of self-propulsion and volume exclusion interactions is the pattern formation mechanism leading to the observed phenomena. In addition, we learn that when cells reverse, as observed in the wild-type, cells form small but strongly elongated clusters and self-organize into a mesh-like structure at high enough densities.
The formation of a collectively moving group benefits individuals within a population in a variety of ways such as ultra-sensitivity to perturbation, collective modes of feeding, and protection from environmental stress. While some collective groups
Combining high-resolution single cell tracking experiments with numerical simulations, we show that starvation-induced fruiting body (FB) formation in Myxococcus xanthus is a phase separation driven by cells that tune their motility over time. The ph
Myxococcus xanthus is a model organism for studying bacterial social behaviors due to its ability to form complex multi-cellular structures. Knowledge of M. xanthus surface gliding motility and the mechanisms that coordinate it are critically importa
Protein pattern formation is essential for the spatial organization of many intracellular processes like cell division, flagellum positioning, and chemotaxis. A prominent example of intracellular patterns are the oscillatory pole-to-pole oscillations
We study the behaviour of interacting self-propelled particles, whose self-propulsion speed decreases with their local density. By combining direct simulations of the microscopic model with an analysis of the hydrodynamic equations obtained by explic