ArticlePLoS computational biology2015
Mechanism for Collective Cell Alignment in Myxococcus xanthus Bacteria.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- First Order Non-Instantaneous Corrections in Collisional Kinetic Alignment Models.Journal of statistical physics · 2026Article
- Genetic and environmental determinants of streaming and aggregation in Myxococcus xanthus.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Capillary interactions drive the self-organization of bacterial colonies.Nature physics · 2025Article
- Dissecting the physics of bacterial biofilms with agent-based simulations.Current opinion in solid state & materials science · 2025Article
- A Dynamical Analysis of the Alignment Mechanism Between Two Interacting Cells.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- Derivation and simulation of a computational model of active cell populations: How overlap avoidance, deformability, cell-cell junctions and cytoskeletal forces affect alignment.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Cell density, alignment, and orientation correlate with C-signal-dependent gene expression duringProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Scattered migrating colony formation in the filamentous cyanobacterium, Pseudanabaena sp. NIES-4403.BMC microbiology · 2021Article
- Linking single-cell decisions to collective behaviours in social bacteria.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Bacterial surface motility is modulated by colony-scale flow and granular jamming.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Shared behavioral mechanisms underlieeLife · 2019Article
- Agent-Based Modeling Reveals Possible Mechanisms for Observed Aggregation Cell Behaviors.Biophysical journal · 2018Article
- Bacterial Surface Spreading Is More Efficient on Nematically Aligned Polysaccharide Substrates.Journal of bacteriology · 2018Article
- On the mechanism of long-range orientational order of fibroblasts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Polymertropism of rod-shaped bacteria: movement along aligned polysaccharide fibers.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Modeling mechanical interactions in growing populations of rod-shaped bacteria.Physical biology · 2017Article
- Data-driven modeling reveals cell behaviors controlling self-organization duringProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Reversals and collisions optimize protein exchange in bacterial swarms.Physical review. E · 2017Article
- Colony Expansion of Socially Motile Myxococcus xanthus Cells Is Driven by Growth, Motility, and Exopolysaccharide Production.PLoS computational biology · 2016Article
- Myxobacteria: Moving, Killing, Feeding, and Surviving Together.Frontiers in microbiology · 2016Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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 underlying the cell alignment and clustering is not fully understood. Motivated by studies of clustering in self-propelled rods, we hypothesized that M. xanthus cells can align and form clusters through pure mechanical interactions among cells and between cells and substrate. We test this hypothesis using an agent-based simulation framework in which each agent is based on the biophysical model of an individual M. xanthus cell. We show that model agents, under realistic cell flexibility values, can align and form cell clusters but only when periodic reversals of cell directions are suppressed. However, by extending our model to introduce the observed ability of cells to deposit and follow slime trails, we show that effective trail-following leads to clusters in reversing cells. Furthermore, we conclude that mechanical cell alignment combined with slime-trail-following is sufficient to explain the distinct clustering behaviors observed for wild-type and non-reversing M. xanthus mutants in recent experiments. Our results are robust to variation in model parameters, match the experimentally observed trends and can be applied to understand surface motility patterns of other bacterial species.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.