Myxobacteria are amongst the top producers of natural products. The diversity and unique structural properties of their secondary metabolites is what make these social microbes highly attractive for drug discovery. Screening of products derived from these bacteria has revealed a puzzling amount of hits against infectious and non-infectious human diseases. Preying mainly on other bacteria and fu...

A study was made of 32 nonpathogenic myxobacterial isolates obtained from a variety of fish taken in the Pacific Northwest. Morphological, cultural, biochemical, and serological studies were carried out on these strains. All were found to be members of the genus Cytophaga. Two myxobacterial strains pathogenic to fish were also included in this study for comparative purposes. These pathogenic or...

Myxobacteria exhibit complex social traits during which large populations of cells coordinate their behaviors. An iconic example is their response to starvation: thousands of cells move by gliding motility to build a fruiting body in which vegetative cells differentiate into spores. Here we review mechanisms that the model species Myxococcus xanthus uses for cell-cell interactions, with a focus...

We develop two models for Myxobacteria swarming, a modified Lattice Gas Cellular Automata (LGCA) model and an off-lattice CA model. In the LGCA model each cell is represented by one node for the center of mass and an extended rod-shaped cell profile. Cells check the surrounding area and choose in which direction to move based on the local interactions. Using this model, we obtained a density vs...

Myxobacteria are known for complex social behaviors including outer membrane exchange (OME), in which cells exchange large amounts of outer membrane lipids and proteins upon contact. The TraA cell surface receptor selects OME partners based on a variable domain. However, traA polymorphism alone is not sufficient to precisely discriminate kin. Here, we report a novel family of OME-delivered toxi...

In early stages of their development, starving myxobacteria organize their motion to produce a periodic pattern of traveling cell density waves. These waves arise from coordination of individual cell reversals by contact signaling when they collide. Unlike waves generated by reaction-diffusion instabilities, which annihilate on collision, myxobacteria waves appear to pass through one another un...

Gliding motility is defined as translocation in the direction of the long axis of the bacterium while in contact with a surface. This definition leaves unspecified any mechanism and, indeed, it appears that there is more than one physiological system underlying the same type of motion. Currently, two distinct mechanisms have been discovered in myxobacteria. One requires the extension, attachmen...

The widespread distribution of fruiting myxobacteria in the soil is fairly well known; however, there have never been reports on these bacteria isolated from the sand of an ocean beach. To establish the presence of myxobacteria in this possible habitat, samples of sand from the high tide marks of four South Carolina beaches were collected (see Table 1). One of the samples, 11, differed from the...

We present a cell-based model to simulate the swarming behavior of various mutants of myxobacteria. Computational complexity is often known to be one of the biggest obstacles in simulating such biological system as there are too many interacting individuals involved in the system. We derive the scaling law for our model, which together with the concept of superindividuals, enable us to perform ...