Living multicellular systems induce decodable spatial patterns in bacterial collectives
- 1Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University
Abstract
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 states in response to nearby Xenopus embryos and Xenobots. The bacteria in a liquid culture formed autonomous motility-dependent patterns that were redirected by living targets into attraction halos, which tracked target position at a distance. Extracellular levels of potassium amplified attraction, altered local potassium dynamics, and coupled target presence to global pattern complexity. Self-supervised machine learning further identified distributed bacterial spatial signatures predictive of Xenopus embryo vs. Xenobot presence at a distance from the target. Together, these findings suggest that bacterial collectives can encode information about the state of other biota in their environment, revealing a previously unrecognized form of inter-kingdom interaction between living morphogenetic systems.
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BibTeX
@misc{sergeeva2026living,
title = {{Living multicellular systems induce decodable spatial patterns in bacterial collectives}},
author = {E. G. Sergeeva and F. Pigozzi and T. F. Varley and C. J. Comerci and Z. Zhao and R. Brucker and G. M. Süel and J. C. Bongard and M. Levin},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.02.748853},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.02.748853v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Living multicellular systems induce decodable spatial patterns in bacterial collectives
AU - E. G. Sergeeva
AU - F. Pigozzi
AU - T. F. Varley
AU - C. J. Comerci
AU - Z. Zhao
AU - R. Brucker
AU - G. M. Süel
AU - J. C. Bongard
AU - M. Levin
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/02
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.02.748853
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.02.748853v1
AB - 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 states in response to nearby Xenopus embryos and Xenobots. The bacteria in a liquid culture formed autonomous motility-dependent patterns that were redirected by living targets into attraction halos, which tracked target position at a distance. Extracellular levels of potassium amplified attraction, altered local potassium dynamics, and coupled target presence to global pattern complexity. Self-supervised machine learning further identified distributed bacterial spatial signatures predictive of Xenopus embryo vs. Xenobot presence at a distance from the target. Together, these findings suggest that bacterial collectives can encode information about the state of other biota in their environment, revealing a previously unrecognized form of inter-kingdom interaction between living morphogenetic systems.
ER -