Microbial communities span many orders of magnitude, ranging in scale from hundreds of
cells on a single particle of soil to billions of cells within the lumen of the gastrointestinal …

All bacteria must compete for growth niches and other limited environmental resources.
These existential battles are waged at several levels, but one common strategy entails the …

Intraspecific competition describes the negative interaction that occurs when different
populations of the same species attempt to fill the same niche. Such competition is predicted …

The ability of bacteria to recognize kin provides a means to form social groups. In turn these
groups can lead to cooperative behaviors that surpass the ability of the individual. Kin …

Microbes face many physical, chemical, and biological insults from their environments. In
response, cells adapt, but whether they do so cooperatively is poorly understood. Here, we …

Myxobacteria are known for complex social behaviors including outer membrane exchange
(OME), in which cells exchange large amounts of outer membrane lipids and proteins upon …

Tomato bacterial wilt (TBW) caused by Ralstonia solanacearum is one of the most
destructive soil-borne diseases. Myxococcus xanthus R31, isolated from healthy tomato …

Myxobacteria are social microbial predators that use cell–cell contacts to identify bacterial or
fungal prey and to differentiate kin relatives to initiate cellular responses. For prey killing …

Myxococcus xanthus is an environmental bacterium that displays a complex life cycle that
includes motility, predation, multicellular fruiting body development, and sporulation. Given …

The ability for bacteria to form boundaries between neighboring colonies as the result of
intra-species inhibition has been described for a limited number of species. Here, we report …