Living multicellular systems induce decodable spatial patterns in bacterial collectives
Living systems continuously modify their environments through chemical, mechanical, metabolic and bioelectrical activity. Whether a presence of a multicellular system can be encoded into the emergent spatial organization of another living collective in a distributed and decodable way is unknown. Here we show that motile Bacillus subtilis populations reorganize their spatial and ionic collective…
Researchers have discovered that multicellular living systems can influence the spatial patterns of bacterial colonies. In a study, motile Bacillus subtilis bacteria were observed to reorganize their behavior in response to nearby Xenopus embryos and Xenobots. These bacteria formed patterns that were directed by the targets, creating attraction halos that kept track of the targets' positions from a distance.
The presence of the living targets amplified the bacteria's attraction and altered the local potassium levels within the environment. This discovery suggests that bacterial collectives can encode information about the state of other biota, establishing a new form of inter-kingdom interaction between morphogenetic systems. Self-supervised machine learning identified distinct spatial signatures in the bacteria that could predict the presence of a Xenopus embryo or a Xenobot at a distance.
This finding highlights the potential for understanding complex interactions between different living organisms.
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