Social Interactions in Myxobacterial Swarming

Swarming, a collective motion of many thousands of cells, produces colonies that rapidly spread over surfaces. In this paper, we introduce a cell-based model to study how interactions between neighboring cells facilitate swarming. We chose to study Myxococcus xanthus, a species of myxobacteria, because it swarms rapidly and has well-defined cell–cell interactions mediated by type IV pili and by slime trails. The aim of this paper is to test whether the cell contact interactions, which are inherent in pili-based S motility and slime-based A motility, are sufficient to explain the observed expansion of wild-type swarms. The simulations yield a constant rate of swarm expansion, which has been observed experimentally. Also, the model is able to quantify the contributions of S motility and A motility to swarming. Some pathogenic bacteria spread over infected tissue by swarming. The model described here may shed some light on their colonization process.: Many bacteria are able to spread rapidly over the surface using a strategy called swarming. When the cells cover a surface at high density and compete with each other for nutrients, swarming permits them to maintain rapid growth at the swarm edge. Swarming with flagella has been investigated for many years, and much has been learned about its regulation. Nevertheless, its choreography, which is somewhat related to the counterflow of pedestrians on a city sidewalk, has remained elusive. It is the bacterial equivalent of dancing toward the exit in a crowd of moving bodies that usually are in close contact. Myxococcus xanthus expands its swarms at 1.6 μm/min, about a third the speed of individual cells gliding over the same surface. Each cell has pilus engines at its front end and slime secretion engines at its rear. Using the known mechanics of these engines and the ways they are coordinated, we have developed a cell-based model to study the role of social interactions in bacterial swarming. The model is able to quantify the contributions of individual motility engines to swarming. It also shows that microscopic social interactions help to form the ordered collective motion observed in swarms.