Self-organizing pattern formation in Myxococcus xanthus

The soil-dwelling bacterium Myxococcus xanthus is a model system for emergent self-organization in response to environmental cues. When starved, M. xanthus self-organize into fruiting bodies, large multicellular aggregates in which sporation occurs. To investigate this behavior, we have developed high-throughput imaging and custom image analysis code that identifies fruiting bodies. Inputting time lapse videos of fruiting body formation allows us to track the evolution of hundreds of individual fruiting bodies. Our methods present a new avenue for high-throughput characterization of fruiting body formation, an important first step in being able to determine how multicellular organization is encoded by the organism’s genome.