Related papers: Mechanism for collective cell alignment in Myxococ…
Colonies of the social bacterium Myxococcus xanthus go through a morphological transition from a thin colony of cells to three-dimensional droplet-like fruiting bodies as a strategy to survive starvation. The biological pathways that…
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…
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…
The soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus lives in densely packed groups that form dynamic three-dimensional patterns in response to environmental changes, such as droplet-like fruiting bodies during starvation. The development of these…
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…
Myxococcus xanthus is a unicellular organism whose cells possess the ability to move and communicate, leading to the emergence of complex collective properties and behaviours. This has made it an ideal model system to study the emergence of…
The plane of bacterial cell division must be precisely positioned. In the bacterium Myxococcus xanthus, the proteins PomX and PomY form a large cluster, which is tethered to the nucleoid by the ATPase PomZ and moves in a stochastic, but…
Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same…
From biofilm and colony formation in bacteria to wound healing and embryonic development in multicellular organisms, groups of living cells must often move collectively. While considerable study has probed the biophysical mechanisms of how…
The bacterium Myxoccocus xanthus produces multicellular protective droplets called fruiting bodies when starved. These structures form initially through the active dewetting of cells into surface-bound droplets, where substantial flows of…
Chemotaxis receptors in E. coli form clusters at the cell poles and also laterally along the cell body, and this clustering plays an important role in signal transduction. Recently, experiments using flourrescence imaging have shown that,…
Circulating tumor cell clusters play an important role in the metastatic cascade. These clusters can acquire a migratory and more invasive phenotype, and coordinate their motion to migrate as a collective. Before such clusters can form by…
Collective motion of cells is common in many physiological processes, including tissue development, repair, and tumor formation. Recent experiments have shown that certain malignant cancer cells form clusters in a chemoattractant gradient,…
Motivated by observations of the dynamics of {\it Myxococcus xanthus}, we present a self-interacting random walk model that describes the competition between chemokinesis and chemotaxis. Cells are constrained to move in one dimension, but…
Epithelial cell clusters often move collectively on a substrate. Mechanical signals play a major role in organizing this behavior. There are a number of experimental observations in these systems which await a comprehensive explanation.…
A new kinetic model for the dynamics of myxobacteria colonies on flat surfaces is derived formally, and first analytical and numerical results are presented. The model is based on the assumption of hard binary collisions of two different…
Bacteria suspension exhibits a wide range of collective phenomena arising from interactions between individual cells. Here we show Serratia marcescens cells near an air-liquid interface spontaneously aggregate into dynamic clusters through…
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…
The collective chemotaxis of multicellular clusters is an important phenomenon in various physiological contexts, ranging from embryonic development to cancer metastasis. Such clusters often display interesting shape dynamics and…
Collective cell migration plays an essential role in various biological processes, such as development or cancer proliferation. While cell-cell interactions are clearly key determinants of collective cell migration -- in addition to…