Related papers: Rheological dynamics of active Myxococcus xanthus …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Myxococcus xanthus cells self-organize into aligned groups, clusters, at various stages of their lifecycle. Formation of these clusters is crucial for the complex dynamic multi-cellular behavior of these bacteria. However, the mechanism…
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…
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…
The population growth of a Staphylococcus aureus culture was followed by rheological measurements, under steady-state and dynamic shear flows. We observed a rich viscoelastic behaviour as a consequence of the bacteria activity. First, the…
Biological tissues have been observed to display emergent fluid-like properties, owing to physical interactions between cells. However, it remains unclear in general how these fluid-like properties affect tissue structure and function.…
Sessile drying droplets in various bio-relevant systems, encompassing passive bio-colloids like DNA, proteins, and blood to active microbes, gain considerable attention due to intricate interplay among different convective flows, droplet…
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…
Rheotaxis is a well-known phenomenon among microbial organisms and artificial active colloids, wherein the swimmers respond to an imposed flow. We report the first experimental evidence of upstream rheotaxis by spherical active droplets. It…
It has been proposed that during the early steps in the origin of life, small droplets could have formed via the segregation of molecules from complex mixtures by phase separation. These droplets could have provided chemical reaction…
To survive starvation, Bacillus subtilis forms durable spores. After asymmetric cell division, the septum grows around the forespore in a process called engulfment, but the mechanism of force generation is unknown. Here, we derived a novel…
Dynamics of the pendant drop coalescing with a sessile drop to form a single daughter droplet is known to form a bridge. The bridge evolution begins with a point contact between the two drops leading to a liquid neck of size comparable to…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
Biological condensates are assemblies of proteins and nucleic acids that form membraneless compartments in cells and play essential roles in cellular functions. In many cases they exhibit the physical properties of liquid droplets that…
The activity of growing living bacteria was investigated using real-time and in situ rheology -- in stationary and oscillatory shear. Two different strains of the human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus -- strain COL and its isogenic cell wall…
Rippling patterns of myxobacteria appear in starving colonies before they aggregate to form fruiting bodies. These periodic traveling cell density waves arise from the coordination of individual cell reversals, resulting from an internal…