Swarming is the fastest known bacterial mode of surface translocation and enables the rapid colonization of a nutrient-rich environment and host tissues. This complex multicellular behavior requires the integration of chemical and physical signals, which leads to the physiological and morphological differentiation of the bacteria into swarmer cells. Here, we provide a review of recent advances ...

Swarming is a particular type of motility that is promoted by flagella and allows bacteria to move rapidly over and between surfaces and through viscous environments. Swarming must confer considerable survival benefit, as a heterogeneous group of bacteria exhibit this form of motility, including strains of Aeromonas, Azospirillum, Bacillus, Burkholderia, Chromobacterium, Clostridium, Escherichi...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa has served as an important organism in the study of biofilm formation; however, we still lack an understanding of the mechanisms by which this microbe transitions to a surface lifestyle. A recent study of the early stages of biofilm formation implicated the control of flagellar reversals and production of an exopolysaccharide (EPS) as factors in the establishment of a sta...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a monoflagellated bacterium that can use its single polar flagellum to swim through liquids and move collectively over semisolid surfaces, a behavior called swarming. Previous studies have shown that experimental evolution in swarming colonies leads to the selection of hyperswarming bacteria with multiple flagella. Here we show that the advantage of such hyperswarmer m...

FlhF is a signal recognition particle-like protein present in monotrichous bacteria. The loss of FlhF in various bacteria results in decreased transcription of class II, III, or IV flagellar genes, leads to diminished or absent motility, and results in the assembly of flagella at nonpolar locations on the cell surface. In this work, we demonstrate that the loss of FlhF results in defective swim...

Detection and analysis of collective behavior in natural and artificial systems is a difficult task which is commonly delegated to a human observer. We present a statistical framework to automatically detect emergent, collective behavior of agents in agent based simulations which exhibit swarming and flocking behavior. Our tunable, transitional-, rotational, and scaleinvariant framework – geome...

Movement over and colonization of surfaces are important survival strategies for bacteria, and many find it advantageous to perform these activities as a group, using quorum sensing to sample population size and synchronize behavior. It is puzzling however, that swarming-proficient and virulent strains of Vibrio parahaemolyticus are silenced for the vibrio archetypal pathway of quorum sensing. ...

We present an approach to developing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarming behaviors and command and control (C2) strategies to govern them. In recent years, the military has become increasingly interested in the development and applications of UAVs. Recent attention has shifted toward designing UAVs which are not only unmanned, but also autonomous or self-controlled. One possible method is to...