Bacteria On The Move, Eating Their Fill

The rippling pattern of a swarm of M. xanthus moving over their prey. John R. Kirby/University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine

From The New York Times:

Bacteria move in mysterious ways. Myxococcus xanthus, for example, a harmless soil microbe, forms rippling swarms by the millions as it devours other microbes as prey.

This organized back-and-forth behavior “was thought to occur particularly in response to starvation,” said John R. Kirby, a microbiologist at the University of Iowa. But Dr. Kirby, James E. Berleman and others at Iowa report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that M. xanthus acts this way in response to food, and uses chemical sensing and signaling pathways to do so.

Directed bacterial movement that is controlled in this way is known as chemotaxis, and has been observed in individual microbes as well as in colonies that organize into biofilms or other structures. Because M. xanthus uses chemotaxis-like pathways to move over its prey, the researchers call this behavior predataxis. (A video is at nytimes.com/science.)

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