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Cooperative pattern formation in multi-component bacterial systems through reciprocal motility regulation

Nature Physics volume 16, pages 1152–1157 (2020)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 11 April 2024

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Abstract

Self-organization is a prerequisite of biological complexity. At the population level, it amounts to spontaneously sorting different individuals through space and time. Here, we reveal a simple mechanism by which different populations of motile cells can self-organize through a reciprocal control of their motilities. We first show how the reciprocal activation of motility between two populations of engineered Escherichia coli makes an initially mixed population of cells segregate, leading to out-of-phase population oscillations without the need of any preexisting positional or orientational cues. By redesigning the interaction, the original segregation between the two populations can be turned into co-localization. We account for this self-organization using a theoretical model that shows the reciprocal control of motility to be a robust and versatile self-organization pathway in multi-component systems. We finally show how our theoretical and experimental results can be generalized to three interacting bacterial populations.

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Fig. 1: Pattern formation of activator strains.
Fig. 2: Pattern formation for inhibitor strains.
Fig. 3: Successive snapshots of simulations of equation (1).
Fig. 4: Self-organization of three-population bacterial colonies.

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Data availability

All data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The algorithms used to produce our numerical results are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Cates, H. Chaté, W. Huang, X. Fu and T. Hwa for discussions. A.I.C. acknowledges a doctoral fellowship from DIM ISC. A.I.C., A.D., J.T., J.H. and Y.Z. acknowledge support from ANR/RGC grants Bactterns and A-HKU712/14. J.H. acknowledges support from the Shenzhen Peacock project (KQTD2015033117210153), the Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Committee Basic Science Research Grant (JCYJ20170413154523577) and CAS Key Laboratory of Quantitative Engineering Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: A. I. Curatolo, N. Zhou, Y. Zhao.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Paris, MSC, UMR 7057 CNRS, Paris, France

    A. I. Curatolo, Y. Zhao, A. Daerr & J. Tailleur

  2. John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    A. I. Curatolo

  3. School of Biomedical Sciences, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong, P R China

    N. Zhou, Y. Zhao & J. Huang

  4. CAS Key Laboratory of Quantitative Engineering Biology, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China

    N. Zhou, C. Liu & J. Huang

  5. School of Physics and Astronomy and Institute of Natural Sciences, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Y. Zhao

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  1. A. I. Curatolo
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Contributions

A.I.C., N.Z., Y.Z., A.D., J.H. and J.T. conceived the project. N.Z. and J.H. conceived and realized the biology experiments. A.I.C. and J.T. conceived and realized the theoretical work. Y.Z. and A.D. built the set-up and carried out the measurements. A.I.C., N.Z., Y.Z., A.D., J.H. and J.T. wrote the manuscript. C.L. was involved in applications for grant support of the project.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to J. Tailleur or J. Huang.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Information and Figs. 1–15.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Video 1

This video displays an independent replicate using the activator strains, leading to the formation of out-of-phase fluorescent stripe patterns.

Supplementary Video 2

This video displays an independent replicate using the inhibitor strains, leading to the formation of in-phase fluorescent stripe patterns.

Supplementary Data 1

This data file contains the simulation results of the density fields rho_A and rho_B shown in Supplementary Fig. 14, at different time points, as well as their sum at the final time point.

Supplementary Data 2

This data file contains the simulation results of the density fields rho_A and rho_B shown in Supplementary Fig. 15, at different time points, as well as their sum at the final time point.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Relative intensity of fluorescence/dark-field signals in Fig. 1c.

Source Data Fig. 2

Relative intensity of fluorescence/dark-field signals in Fig. 2c.

Source Data Fig. 3

Simulation results of density fields in Fig. 3a,b.

Source Data Fig. 4

Relative intensity of fluorescence signals in Fig. 4c,f.

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Curatolo, A.I., Zhou, N., Zhao, Y. et al. Cooperative pattern formation in multi-component bacterial systems through reciprocal motility regulation. Nat. Phys. 16, 1152–1157 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0964-z

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