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Updated: Jan 22, 2026
11:45
Fluorescence Live-cell Imaging of the Complete Vegetative Cell Cycle of the Slow-growing Social Bacterium Myxococcus xanthus
Published on: June 20, 2018
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Self-Driven Phase Transitions Drive Myxococcus xanthus Fruiting Body Formation
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.
Physical Review Letters
|July 20, 2019
Summary
Starvation triggers Myxococcus xanthus to form fruiting bodies through a process of phase separation. This bacterial self-organization is driven by cells adjusting their movement, controlled at the individual cell level.
Area of Science:
- Microbiology
- Biophysics
- Cellular dynamics
Background:
- Myxococcus xanthus exhibits complex multicellular behaviors, including starvation-induced fruiting body formation.
- Understanding the physical mechanisms driving these collective cell behaviors is crucial for cell biology.
Purpose of the Study:
- To elucidate the physical principles underlying Myxococcus xanthus fruiting body formation.
- To investigate the role of cell motility and density in this developmental process.
Main Methods:
- High-resolution single-cell tracking experiments.
- Numerical simulations of cellular dynamics.
- Analysis of cell density and Péclet number.
Main Results:
- Fruiting body formation is a phase separation process.
- Cell motility, characterized by speed and reversal frequency, is dynamically tuned over time.
- Phase separation is quantitatively described by cell density and a dimensionless Péclet number.
Conclusions:
- Myxococcus xanthus utilizes a self-driven, nonequilibrium phase transition for fruiting body formation.
- This process is controllable at the single-cell level through motility modulation.
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