Related papers: Tutorial for the growth and development of Myxococ…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Motility is an essential factor for an organism's survival and diversification. With the advent of novel single-cell technologies, analytical frameworks and theoretical methods, we can begin to probe the complex lives of microscopic motile…
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…
The large scale behaviour of a population of cells that grow and interact through the concentration field of the chemicals they secrete is studied using dynamical renormalization group methods. The combination of the effective long-range…
Cell deformability is an essential determinant for tissue-scale mechanical nature, such as fluidity and rigidity, and is thus crucial for understanding tissue homeostasis and stable developmental processes. However, numerical simulations…
A simple model for the formation of a complex organism is introduced. Individuals can communicate and specialize, leading to an increase in productivity. If there are limits to the capacity of individuals to communicate with other…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
The emergence of multicellularity and developmental programs are among the major problems of evolutionary biology. Traditionally, research in this area has been based on the combination of data analysis and experimental work on one hand and…
Escherichia coli has long been used as a model organism due to the extensive experimental characterization of its pathways and molecular components. Take chemotaxis as an example, which allows bacteria to sense and swim in response to…
As cells grow and divide under a given environment, they become crowded and resources are limited, as seen in bacterial biofilms and multicellular aggregates. These cells often show strong interactions through exchanging chemicals, as in…
In this paper we consider dynamics of a molecular system subjected to external pumping by a light source. Within a completely quantum mechanical treatment, we derive a general formula, which enables to asses effects of different light…
In nature, bacterial collectives typically consist of multiple species, which are interacting both biochemically and physically. Nonetheless, past studies on the physical properties of swarming bacteria were focused on axenic (single…