ArticleNature communications2018
Spatial self-organization resolves conflicts between individuality and collective migration.
Article in Nature communications, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 63 papers.
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Who cites it
63 citing papers in PubMed.
- Stable coexistence and transport of lytic phage infections with migrating bacterial hosts.Science advances · 2026Article
- Death and chemotaxis: Bacterial chemotaxis enables collective escape from phage predation.Science advances · 2026Article
- Co-migration of hundreds of microbial species over metres drives selection and promotes non-motile hitchhikers.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Growth-dependent sensory bet-hedging enhances collective navigation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Rage against the mean: a perspective on measuring fitness of individual phage particles.Npj viruses · 2026Review
- Collective bacterial condensation is fundamentally constrained by the emergence of active turbulence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
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- Article
- Single-array measurements reveal non-uniform, mosaic-like chemosensory arrays in bacteria.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Spatial self-organization of confined bacterial suspensions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Bakuchiol, a Natural Antioxidant, Synergizes with Colistin Against Multidrug-Resistant Gram-Negative Bacteria by Disrupting Iron Homeostasis and Membrane Integrity.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- ChemotaxingArXiv · 2025Article
- ChemotaxingbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Self-generated chemotaxis of mixed cell populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Navigating bacterial motility through chemotaxis: from molecular mechanisms to physiological perspectives.Folia microbiologica · 2025Review
- Phenotype structuring in collective cell migration: a tutorial of mathematical models and methods.Journal of mathematical biology · 2025Review
- Role of a single MCP in evolutionary adaptation ofApplied and environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- A travelling-wave strategy for plant-fungal trade.Nature · 2025Article
- Nongenetic adaptation by collective migration.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Multiorifice acoustic microrobot for boundary-free multimodal 3D swimming.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Collective behavior can spontaneously emerge when individuals follow common rules of interaction. However, the behavior of each individual differs due to existing genetic and non-genetic variation within the population. It remains unclear how this individuality is managed to achieve collective behavior. We quantify individuality in bands of clonal Escherichia coli cells that migrate collectively along a channel by following a self-generated gradient of attractant. We discover that despite substantial differences in individual chemotactic abilities, the cells are able to migrate as a coherent group by spontaneously sorting themselves within the moving band. This sorting mechanism ensures that differences between individual chemotactic abilities are compensated by differences in the local steepness of the traveling gradient each individual must navigate, and determines the minimum performance required to travel with the band. By resolving conflicts between individuality and collective migration, this mechanism enables populations to maintain advantageous diversity while on the move.
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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.