Myxococcus exhibits striking coordinated movements involving thousands of individual cells. Myxobacterial cells move by gliding, a form of translocation restricted to surfaces. Despite the complexity of their movement, myxobacteria have the structural, chemical, and genetic simplicity of Gram-negative bacteria. How myxobacteria glide, and how they communicate with each other to coordinate their gliding, are the subjects of this research. Mutants that had lost the ability to glide from a single mutational step were all found to be defective in producing the same protein, mg1A, which implies an important role for this protein in gliding. Antibodies have been raised to mg1A protein, and will be used to find the number, location, and distribution of this important gliding protein in the cells. How production of mg1A protein is regulated has been determined by study of its messenger RNA. Another gene, called tgl, is used to control gliding by cell - cell interactions. Tgl is necessary for socially motile cells which move when they are within a cell's length of another cell. Tgl is also necessary for a cell contact dependent stimulation of motility whereby cells in a mixture of two different nonmotile mutants can move transiently. The location of tgl protein in cells, and what happens to the protein during stimulation, will be determined. The highly organized movements of myxobacteria are in some ways clearly analogous to morphogenetic movements of cells during development of multicellular animals. The structural and genetic simplicity of the myxobacterial system allows these phenomena to be studied more readily than in more complex biological systems. The results of these studies are expected to shed some light on general principals underlying cellular mass migrations.
