Self-Driven Phase Transitions Drive Myxococcus xanthus Fruiting Body Formation
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Updated: Jan 22, 2026

Fluorescence Live-cell Imaging of the Complete Vegetative Cell Cycle of the Slow-growing Social Bacterium Myxococcus xanthus
Published on: June 20, 2018
Guannan Liu1, Adam Patch2, Fatmagül Bahar3
1Joseph Henry Laboratories of Physics and Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
Abstract:
Combining high-resolution single cell tracking experiments with numerical simulations, we show that starvation-induced fruiting body formation in Myxococcus xanthus is a phase separation driven by cells that tune their motility over time. The phase separation can be understood in terms of cell density and a dimensionless Péclet number that captures cell motility through speed and reversal frequency. Our work suggests that M. xanthus takes advantage of a self-driven nonequilibrium phase transition that can be controlled at the single cell level.
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