Department of Mathematics, California State University Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2011;6(7):e22169. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0022169. Epub 2011 Jul 19.
Identifying essential factors in cellular interactions and organized movement of cells is important in predicting behavioral phenotypes exhibited by many bacterial cells. We chose to study Myxococcus xanthus, a soil bacterium whose individual cell behavior changes while in groups, leading to spontaneous formation of aggregation center during the early stage of fruiting body development. In this paper, we develop a cell-based computational model that solely relies on experimentally determined parameters to investigate minimal elements required to produce the observed social behaviors in M. xanthus. The model verifies previously known essential parameters and identifies one novel parameter, the active turning, which we define as the ability and tendency of a cell to turn to a certain angle without the presence of any obvious external factors. The simulation is able to produce both gliding pattern and spontaneous aggregation center formation as observed in experiments. The model is tested against several known M. xanthus mutants and our modification of parameter values relevant for the individual mutants produces good phenotypic agreements. This outcome indicates the strong predictive potential of our model for the social behaviors of uncharacterized mutants and their expected phenotypes during development.
确定细胞间相互作用和细胞有序运动的基本要素对于预测许多细菌细胞表现出的行为表型非常重要。我们选择研究粘细菌，一种土壤细菌，其单个细胞的行为在群体中会发生变化，导致在子实体发育的早期自发形成聚集中心。在本文中，我们开发了一种基于细胞的计算模型，该模型仅依赖于实验确定的参数来研究产生粘细菌观察到的社会行为所需的最小要素。该模型验证了以前已知的基本参数，并确定了一个新的参数，即主动转向，我们将其定义为细胞在没有任何明显外部因素的情况下转向某个角度的能力和趋势。模拟能够产生与实验中观察到的滑行模式和自发聚集中心形成相一致的结果。该模型经过了几个已知的粘细菌突变体的测试，我们对与单个突变体相关的参数值的修改产生了良好的表型一致性。这一结果表明，我们的模型对于未表征的突变体及其在发育过程中的预期表型的社会行为具有很强的预测潜力。
