The Effect Of Slime Navigation On Spreading Of Protein In Swarming Groups Of Myxococcus Xanthus Bacteria

Swarming groups of bacterium Myxococcus xanthus coordinate their behavior by self-organizing as a population to move over surfaces in search of nutrients and optimal niches for colonization.
These very social bacteria are self-propelled by production of slime, regularly reverse direction of their motion and follow slime tracks produced by other bacteria. In this work, Novel model simulations which take into account bacteria slime production and average number and duration of cell-cell connections, are used to study the impact of such navigations on the cell-cell contact-dependent protein exchange. It has been shown experimentally that optimized exchange of outer membrane proteins can be beneficial to the bacterial population including rescuing the gliding motility of motility mutants under nutrient-rich conditions.