Polar and nematic states drive 3D pattern formation in the bacterium Myxococcus xanthus

Date

May 23, 2024

Time

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Speaker

Joshua Shaevitz

Affiliation

Princeton University

Series

MPI-CBG Thursday Seminar

Language

en

Main Topic

Biologie

Host

Ricard Alert

Description

The soil dwelling bacterium Myxococcus xanthus is an amazing organism that uses collective motility to hunt in giant packs when near prey and to form beautiful and protective macroscopic structures comprising millions of cells when food is scarce. I will present an overview of how these cells move and how they regulate that motion to produce different phases of collective behavior. Inspired by recent work on active matter and the physics liquid crystals, I will discuss experiments that reveal how these cells generate nematic order, how defect structure can dictate global behavior, how transient polar states govern the ultimate dynamics, and how cells actively tune the Péclet number of the population to drive a phase transition from a gas-like flocking state to an aggregated liquid-droplet state during starvation.

Last modified: May 24, 2024, 7:40:00 AM