Director’s guest: Tâm Mignot, LCB, Marseille -“From cells to molecular interactions and back: understanding collective movements in bacteria”

Abstract

Myxococcus xanthus is a bacterial model system used to understand how cells form highly cooperative, motile groups that develop and move across surfaces. Over the years, we have developed single-cell approaches to study how individual bacteria move and make decisions that regulate their direction of movement at the molecular level. We then built models and simulations to investigate how single cells can organize into multicellular patterns, such as cooperative swarms and traveling waves.

During this seminar, I will present each of these steps and show how such studies have enabled us to uncover molecular mechanisms that explain complex collective behaviors.