Evidence map›Paper›PMID 34726151›Full record

ArticleeLife2021

Spatial modulation of individual behaviors enables an ordered structure of diverse phenotypes during bacterial group migration.

Yang Bai, Caiyun He, Pan Chu, Junjiajia Long, Xuefei Li, Xiongfei Fu

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in eLife, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
11citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

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.

2 · The registry

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.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

11 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
  2. Growth-dependent sensory bet-hedging enhances collective navigation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026
    Article
  3. Interactions Between Active Matters and Endogenous Fields.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2025
    Review
  4. Article
  5. Nongenetic adaptation by collective migration.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025
    Article
  6. Navigated range expansion promotes migratory culling.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024
    Article
  7. Direct measurement of dynamic attractant gradients reveals breakdown of the Patlak-Keller-Segel chemotaxis model.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024
    Article
  8. Synthetic consciousness architecture.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2024
    Article
  9. Collective behavior and nongenetic inheritance allow bacterial populations to adapt to changing environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022
    Article
  10. Review
  11. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

6 authors.

Yang Bai *CAS Key Laboratory for Quantitative Engineering Biology, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Synthetic Genomics, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9976-2686
Caiyun He *CAS Key Laboratory for Quantitative Engineering Biology, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Synthetic Genomics, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.
Pan ChuCAS Key Laboratory for Quantitative Engineering Biology, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Synthetic Genomics, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.
Junjiajia LongYale University, Department of Physics, New Haven, United States.
Xuefei LiCAS Key Laboratory for Quantitative Engineering Biology, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Synthetic Genomics, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.
Xiongfei FuCAS Key Laboratory for Quantitative Engineering Biology, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Synthetic Genomics, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3657-8296

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Coordination of diverse individuals often requires sophisticated communications and high-order computational abilities. Microbial populations can exhibit diverse individualistic behaviors, and yet can engage in collective migratory patterns with a spatially sorted arrangement of phenotypes. However, it is unclear how such spatially sorted patterns emerge from diverse individuals without complex computational abilities. Here, by investigating the single-cell trajectories during group migration, we discovered that, despite the constant migrating speed of a group, the drift velocities of individual bacteria decrease from the back to the front. With a Langevin-type modeling framework, we showed that this decreasing profile of drift velocities implies the spatial modulation of individual run-and-tumble random motions, and enables the bacterial population to migrate as a pushed wave front. Theoretical analysis and stochastic simulations further predicted that the pushed wave front can help a diverse population to stay in a tight group, while diverse individuals perform the same type of mean reverting processes around centers orderly aligned by their chemotactic abilities. This mechanism about the emergence of orderly collective migration from diverse individuals is experimentally demonstrated by titration of bacterial chemoreceptor abundance. These results reveal a simple computational principle for emergent ordered behaviors from heterogeneous individuals.

Indexed as

ChemotaxisEscherichia coliModels, BiologicalSingle-Cell Analysisagent-based simulationbacterial chemotaxiscollective behaviorE. coliinfectious diseaselangevin modelmicrobiologypattern formationphenotypic diversityphysics of living systems

Identifiers

PMID34726151
PMCPMC8563000

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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.