25.

A MODEL FOR GLIDING AND AGGREGATION OF MYXOBACTERIA

Angela Stevens

SFB 123, Institut fur Angewandte Mathematik

Im Neuenheimer Feld 294, D-6900 Heidelberg

1. Introduction

In morphogenesis, cells recognize and find each other to build complex

structures. Up to now, the mechanism for this phenomenon is not fully
understood. Because of their cooperative gliding and aggregation, the
myxobacteria serve as a model problem for investigations in this direction. To
get a better insight into these problems, a theoretical approach is chosen and
represented in a cellular automaton model.

2. Biology

The myxobacteria show the cell cycle illustrated in Fig. 1 (compare the
picture in [11] ).

The model is dealing with the vegetative state of the myxobacteria where
they form different patterns during their communal gliding.

The bacteria produce extracellular slime which they prefer to glide on.
Once on the slime trail, they increase their gliding velocity. They build
tracks or swarms of cells which merge to form larger ones or split into
smaller ones. They glide around open circles and in spirals. Just before
aggregation, patterns of rhythmic pulsating waves occur. Different biological
hypotheses and models for this behaviour are described in [1-6,9,13,15]. These
hypotheses are discussed in [14].

3. Monte-Carlo-Simulations

The modelling features for the Monte-Carlo-Simulations presented in this paper

are:
(a) the following of the slime trails;
(b) the introduction of a chemoattractant which is produced by the
bacteria to reach the final aggregation.

The simulations are realized with a 'Four Nearest Neighbours Cellular

Automaton Model'. The bacteria (length: 8 units; width: 1 unit) are
distributed randomly over an area of (100 unitsJ 2 with periodic boundary
conditions. Each of them glides to one of the four nearest neighbours of its

Nonlinear Wave Processes in Excllable ,'vtedia 269

Edited by A. V. Holden eta/., Plenum Press, New York
270 A. Stevens

r-+

I
cell divison
cooperative
gliding and

~~~
:~ggrcga tion
under
vegetative s1arva1ion
cells conditions
t t
oo - oo
0 0
myxospores

Figure 1.

head (Fig. 2) without crossing itself.

Define G:={1, ... , 100}, let

describe the density of slime in space and time, and

D:G 2 x N---) R
+

describe the density of the diffusing chemoattractant, let w5 , wDER+ be

weightfactors for the slime and the chemoattractant. Let NY be the set of the
four nearest neighbours of y E c2 . Now looking at one bacterium, let h(t)
describe the orientation of the head of the bacterium at timet (see Fig. 2).
Define B:={x E G2 1x is part of the bacterium}, then the probability for a
bacterium with its head positioned at y at time t to glide to x 0 E NY, x 0 ~B
is:

(1)

where

10.0 if x is neighbour in direction of the

c(y,x,h(t)) { orientation h(t) of y
1. 0 else

The probability is 0 for x 0 E B.

The parameters w5 and wD are chosen so that wD w5 > c(, , ). This

means that the bacteria react with the following preference: