News From the Field
Predatory Bacterial Crowdsourcing
September 27, 2012
Scientists at Rice University and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Medical School have discovered the mechanism that allows one of the world's smallest predators--the soil bacteria Myxococcus xanthus--to form collective waves that spread and engulf bacterial prey. The study, featured on the cover of this month's PLOS Computational Biology, finds that the same mechanism helps M. xanthus spread quickly and stay atop prey until it is devoured.
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